Gillian Hadfield

Director, Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society

Role: Economist

Site: CDL-Toronto

Stream: Artificial Intelligence

Gillian K. Hadfield, B.A. (Hons.) Queens, J.D., M.A., Ph.D. (Economics) Stanford, is Professor of Law and Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Toronto and holds the Schwartz Reisman Chair in Technology and Society. 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 current research is focused on innovative design for legal and regulatory systems for AI and other complex global technologies; computational models of human normative systems; and working with machine learning researchers to build ML systems that understand and respond to human norms. Professor Hadfield is a Faculty Member and CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Toronto and at the Center for Human-Compatible AI at the University of California Berkeley and Senior Policy Advisor at OpenAI in San Francisco. 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; a paperback edition with a new prologue on AI was published in 2020 and an audiobook version released in 2021.

Professor Hadfield served as clerk to Chief Judge Patricia Wald on the U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit. She was previously on the faculty at the University of Southern California, New York University, and the University of California Berkeley, and has been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, Harvard, Columbia, and Hastings College of Law. She was a 2022 Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, a 2006-07 and 2010-11 fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, 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.

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