Bio

Research & Scholarship

Hadfield is a leading expert on building AI systems that understand and respond to human values and norms and in designing regulatory policies that operate with the velocity necessary to ensure frontier AI model development is safe and beneficial to society. Her interdisciplinary work at the nexus of law, economics, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science has been featured in leading journals such as PNAS and Science and keynote addresses at major AI conferences and workshops such as COLM and ICML. Today, she works on ensuring AI systems and agents align with human values and norms with the Normativity Lab at Johns Hopkins and collaborators across academia and industry, promotes better AI policy with the non-profit Fathom and serves as Board Chair for the Cooperative AI Foundation. 

Hadfield’s influential book, Rules for a Flat World: Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent It for a Complex Global Economy (Oxford University Press 2017; paperback edition with a new prologue on AI in 2020) introduced “regulatory markets,” which are dynamic, democratically-accountable systems that enable regulation to keep pace with rapid technological innovation. In 2026 she published Regulatory Markets: The Future of AI Governance in Jurimetrics: The Journal of Law, Science and Technology laying out the solutions that overcome both the technical deficit that confronts conventional regulation and the democratic deficit of excessive delegation of regulatory oversight to industry. She has presented her research on regulatory markets both at academic venues worldwide and engages in pragmatic efforts to use these ideas to advance AI governance at the domestic and global level through her participation in the International Dialogues on AI Safety, the World Economic Forum AI Governance Alliance, and with government agencies and regulators worldwide. 

Academic Background & Professional Experience

Professor Hadfield holds a JD and PhD in Economics from Stanford University. She is professor of law (status-only) at the University of Toronto. 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 for Technology and Society at the University of Toronto. Previously, she was the Richard L. and Antoinette Schamoi Kirtland Professor of Law and Professor of Economics at the University of Southern California. From 2018 to 2023 she was a Senior Policy Advisor for OpenAI.

She began her academic career as an assistant professor of law at the University of California Berkeley, and has been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, Harvard, Columbia, NYU, 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 1992-1993.

Leadership & Advisory Roles

Professor Hadfield serves in leadership and advisory roles across organizations focused on AI governance, safety, and alignment.