Gillian Hadfield

Gillian Kereldena Hadfield (born July 14, 1961) is a Canadian economist, legal scholar and artificial intelligence researcher who is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of AI Alignment and Governance. She is also Professor of Law and of Strategic Management at Toronto, Canada CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute, and an AI2050 Senior Fellow. From 2018 to 2023, Hadfield served as Senior Policy Adviser to the artificial intelligence company OpenAI.

She was previously the director and eponymous chair of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law and the Richard L. and Antoinette Schamoi Kirtland Professor of Law and Professor of Economics at the University of Southern California. At USC, Hadfield directed the Southern California Innovation Project and the USC Center in Law, Economics, and Organization. She is a former member of the board of directors for the American Law and Economics Association and the International Society for New Institutional Economics.

Education and early career Hadfield received her BA with honours in economics from Queen's University in 1983.

Academic career Hadfield joined the faculty of the UC Berkeley School of Law as an assistant law professor in 1990. From 1994 to 1999, Hadfield was an associate law professor at the University of Toronto Law School, and then a professor of law from 1999 to 2001. In 2010, Hadfield was the Sidley Austin Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School, and in 2008, was the Justin W. D'Atri Visiting Professor of Law, Business, and Society at Columbia Law School. While at OpenAI, Hadfield proposed "regulatory markets, in which governments require the targets of regulation to purchase regulatory services from a private regulator" as a new form of regulation for the AI industry.

In 2024, Hadfield joined Johns Hopkins University as Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of AI Alignment and Governance holding joint appointments in the School of Government and Policy and the Department of Computer Science in the Whiting School of Engineering. She is currently the Principal Investigator of the Normativity Lab.

Publications Hadfield's work is widely published in law journals, including the Stanford Law Review, and in peer-reviewed journals, including the Annals of Internal Medicine, the Journal of Comparative Economics, the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, and the Annual Review of Law and Social Science.