Prof. Gillian Hadfield
Schwartz Reisman Chair in Technology and Society, Professor of Law and Professor of Strategic Management. CIFAR AI Chair. Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Senior Fellow.

Jackman Law Building, room J440
78 Queen's Park
Toronto, Ontario M5S 2C5

Tel.: 416-978-4214

Gillian Hadfield is the inaugural Schwartz Reisman Chair in Technology and Society, Professor of Law, Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Toronto 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. She teaches Contracts and Governance of AI.

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, 

Education
Ph.D. (Economics) – Stanford University
M.A. (Economics) – Stanford University
J.D. – Stanford Law School
B.A. (Hons.) (Economics) – Queen’s University
Academic appointments
Professor of Strategic Management, Rotman School of Management
Canada CIFAR AI Chair, Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence
Faculty Affiliate, Center for Human-Compatible AI at the University of California, Berkeley
Schwartz Reisman Chair in Technology and Society
Awards and distinctions
Canada CIFAR AI Chair (2022-2026)
Mundell Medal for Excellence in Legal Writing (2019)
Member, American Law Institute
Member, Order of the Coif
Phi Kappa Phi Faculty Recognition Award (2018)
Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (2006-2007, 2010-2011)
Olin Fellow in Law and Economics, University of Southern California Law School (2000-2001)
Olin Fellow in Law and Economics, Cornell Law School (1999-2000)
National First Prize, Nathan Burkan Memorial Competition (1988)
New Directions Mellon Fellowship (1986)
Selected publications

"Judging facts, fudging norms: training machine learning models to judge humans requires a modified approach to labeling data" Science Advances (2023)

"Legal Markets" Journal of Economic Literature (2022)

"Spurious normativity improves the capacity of agents to learn stable enforcement and compliance behaviors” (with Raphael Koster, Dylan Hadfield-Menell, Richard Everett, Laura Weidinger and Joel Z Leibo) PNAS (2022)

"A Positive Theory of the Rule of Law” (with Jens Meierhenrich and Barry R. Weingast) in Meierhenrich, J. and Loughlin, M. The Cambridge Companion to the Rule of Law (2022)

“Cooperative AI: machines must learn to find common ground” (with Allan Dafoe, Yoram Bachrach, Eric Horvitz, Kate Larson and Thore Graepel) Nature (2021)

“Incomplete Contracts and the AI Alignment Problem” (with Dylan Hadfield-Menell) Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI Ethics and Society (2019)

“Legible Normativity for AI Alignment: The Value of Silly Rules” (with Dylan Hadfield-Menell and McKane Andrus) Proceedings of the AAAI/ ACM Conference on AI Ethics and Society (2019)

“Is Rule of Law an Equilibrium Without Private Ordering?” (with Barry Weingast) in Jack Knight and Melissa Schwartz (eds.) Privatization: NOMOS LX, (NYU Press, 2018).

Rules for a Flat World: Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent It for a Complex Global Economy (Oxford University Press, 2017).

“Scaffolding:  Using Formal Contracts to Build Informal Relations to Support Innovation.” (with Iva Bozovic) Wisconsin Law Review Vol. 2016, pp. 981-1032

“How to Regulate Legal Services to Promote Access, Innovation, and the Quality of Lawyering.” (with Deborah Rhode). (2016) Hastings Law Journal Vol 67, pp. 1191-1223.

“Life in the Law-Thick World:  The Legal Resource Landscape for Ordinary Americans.” (with Jamie Heine).  In S. Estreicher and J Radice (eds.) Beyond Elite Law:  Access to Civil Justice in America (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Research areas
Contracts
Economic Analysis of Law
Law and Globalization
Law and International Development
Legal Theory

Publications

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