Gillian Hadfield

Gillian K. Hadfield is an economist and legal scholar turned AI researcher thinking about how humans build the normative world and how to make sure AI plays by rules that make us all better off. She is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of AI Alignment and Governance at the Whiting School of Engineering and the School of Government and Policy at Johns Hopkins University. She is professor of law (status-only) at the University of Toronto. Hadfield is a faculty member of the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence and is a Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Senior Fellow. Hadfield’s research focuses on innovative design for legal, regulatory, and technical systems for AI, computational models of human normative systems, and building AI systems that understand and respond to human values and norms. She is a faculty affiliate at the Center for Human-Compatible AI at the University of California Berkeley and she previously served as the inaugural director and held the Schwartz Reisman Chair in Technology and Society at the Schwartz Reisman Institute at the University of Toronto. 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 has served as 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 Working Group on Safe Systems and Technologies of the World Economic Forum’s AI Governance Alliance. She was a member of the Canadian AI Advisory Council and of the World Economic Forum’s Future Council for Agile Governance, co-curating 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.