Gillian Hadfield, a leading scholar and advocate for legal reform and redesign, is the latest pioneering academic to be drawn by Toronto's growing reputation as an advanced technology hub.
A native of Oakville, Ont., she rejoins the University of Toronto Faculty of Law after 17 years on faculty at the University of Southern California. She taught at U of T from 1995-2001.
Her research examines how to make law more accessible, effective, and capable of fulfilling its role in delivering the Fourth Industrial Revolution. "Our legal infrastructure is no longer well-adapted to meeting the challenges of technology and globalization," says Hadfield.
As well as her research interests in legal design to better address the challenges of globalization and digitization, Hadfield also brings experience from the World Economic Forum's Future Council on Agile Governance. She is also a senior policy adviser to OpenAI, a non-profit AI research company based in San Francisco
In the fall semester, Hadfield will offer a reading course built around her book, Rules for a Flat World: Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent it for a Complex Global Economy (OUP 2017).
The course serves as prerequisite for the Legal Design Lab, a centre of innovation that is one of the first of its kind for law students in Canada. She will teach that course in the spring semester with her husband, Dan Ryan of the Faculty of Information.
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