Gillian Hadfield

On leave 2024-2025

Gillian Hadfield was the inaugural Schwartz Reisman Chair in Technology and Society, and is Professor of Law, Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Toronto. She is also Professor of Government and Policy and Professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University and holds a CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence.  She is a Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Senior Fellow. She was the inaugural Director of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society from 2019 through 2023. Her research is focused on the study of human and machine normative systems; safety and governance for artificial intelligence (AI); and innovative design for legal and dispute resolution systems in advanced and developing market economies.  She has also long studied the markets for law, lawyers, and dispute resolution; and contract law and theory. 

Prior to rejoining the University of Toronto in 2018, Professor Hadfield was the Richard L. and Antoinette Schamoi Kirtland Professor of Law and Professor of Economics at the University of Southern California from 2001 to 2018.  She began her teaching career at the University of California Berkeley and was previously on the University of Toronto Faculty of Law from 1995-2000. Her book Rules for a Flat World: Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent It for a Complex Global Economy was published by Oxford University Press in 2017 and in paperback with an updated prologue focused on AI in 2020.

Professor Hadfield served as clerk to Chief Judge Patricia Wald on the U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit.  She was the Daniel R. Fischel and Sylvia M. Neil Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Chicago (Fall 2016), the Eli Goldston Visiting Professor (Spring 2012) and the Sidley Austin Visiting Professor (Winter 2010) at Harvard Law School, and the Justin W. D'Atri Visiting Professor of Law, Business and Society at Columbia Law School (Fall 2008.) She was a 2022 Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center in 2022, 2006-07 and 2010-11 fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution in 1993. She also has held Olin Fellowships at Columbia Law School, Cornell Law School, and USC. She is past president of the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics and the Canadian Law and Economics Association, a former director of the American Law and Economics Association and the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics, and a member of the American Law Institute.  She has served on the editorial boards for the Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Law and Social Inquiry and the University of Toronto Law Journal and is a founding trustee of the Cooperative AI Foundation.

Professor Hadfield was a Senior Policy Advisor for OpenAI in San Francisco from 2018 to 2023, and is an advisor to courts, governments and several organizations and technology companies engaged in innovating new ways to make law and policy smarter, more accessible, and more responsive to technology and artificial intelligence, including the Hague Institute for Innovation of Law, LegalZoom, and Responsive Law. She is a member of the Canadian AI Advisory Council. She was a member of the World Economic Forum’s Future Council for Agile Governance and co-curated their Transformation Map for Justice and Legal Infrastructure; she previously served on the Forum’s Future Council for Technology, Values and Policy and Global Agenda Council for Justice; and was a member of the American Bar Association’s Commission on the Future of Legal Education,