By Lucianna Ciccocioppo / Photo by Jeff Kirk
The Faculty of Law’s Professor Lisa Austin, LLM 1998, is among the first group of scholars to be recognized with the newly announced and prominent University of Toronto President’s Impact Award. She's one of seven recipients for 2018.
The President’s Impact Awards celebrate remarkable U of T scholars whose research impact on society reverberates significantly beyond academia, in areas such as culture, public policy or law, practices or services, education, the development of products, processes or services from inventions, the economy, health, a profession, the environment, quality of life or through public engagement.
Austin holds the Chair in Law and Technology and is cross-appointed to the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. She is a Connaught Scholar and co-founder of the Information Technology, Transparency, and Transformation (IT3) Lab at the University of Toronto, which seeks multidisciplinary solutions to problems involving privacy and transparency.
Her research has consistently tested fundamental legal orthodoxies and has broadly influenced the development of law and policy within Canada.
She is a world-leading academic on privacy law with a strong international reputation in her field, which includes privacy law, legal theory, and private law, and the Supreme Court of Canada and other Canadian courts have cited her scholarship in privacy work numerous times.
Her scholarship investigates the limits of existing privacy law frameworks and theoretical models in the face of the informational challenges of the 21st century. Moreover, her research has consistently tested fundamental legal orthodoxies and has broadly influenced the development of law and policy within Canada.
She is actively involved in public policy debates in Canada, and various forms of community consultation. She has testified before Parliamentary committees on law reform, made submissions to Parliament and regulatory bodies, and assisted with court interventions. She has authored opinion pieces in national newspapers, and been published in journals such as Legal Theory, Law and Philosophy, Theoretical Inquiries in Law, Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, and Canadian Journal of Law and Society.
Professor Austin has been a visiting professor at the National University of Singapore and Tel Aviv University, and is currently co-teaching with a law class and professor in Tel Aviv a JD course in global privacy issues at the Faculty of Law.
U of T President’s Impact Award winners receive a monetary award of $10,000 per year for five years to further their research, and recipients are recognized at the annual U of T Salutes! event lauding their research and innovation excellence. Recipients are determined by a nomination process and internal review, and determined by a committee chaired by the Vice President, Research & Innovation.
