Schwartz Reisman Institute Director Gillian Hadfield will discuss the recently-released paperback edition—with new prologue on responsible AI—of her book, Rules For a Flat World: Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent It for a Complex Global Economy.
Technology and globalization are uprooting and reshaping daily life. Global supply chains are now deeply embedded, and digital platforms connect almost everyone in complex networks of data and exchange. This "flat world" is one of tremendous possibility, but it also poses challenges to stability and shared prosperity.
In Rules for a Flat World, Gillian Hadfield argues that the legal rules that currently guide global integration are no longer working. They are too slow, costly, and localized for increasingly complex advanced economies, and fail to address issues such as poverty, instability, and oppression for the billions living in the developing world. Hadfield proposes a new set of rules that enhance complex societies and economic interdependence and makes the case for building a more agile infrastructure.
Event details
In conversation with: Sarah Kaplan, Distinguished Professor and Director - Institute for Gender and the Economy; Professor of Strategic Management, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.
Introduction by: Ken Corts, Interim Dean; Marcel Desautels Chair in Entrepreneurship; Professor of Economic Analysis and Policy, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.
About Gillian Hadfield
Gillian Hadfield is the inaugural Schwartz Reisman Chair in Technology and Society, Professor of Law, and Professor of Strategic Management. She is also Director of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. Her research is focused on innovative design for legal and dispute resolution systems in advanced and developing market economies; governance for artificial intelligence (AI); the markets for law, lawyers, and dispute resolution; and contract law and theory. She teaches Contracts; Problems in Legal Design; Legal Design Lab, and Responsible 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.
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 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 and is a member of the Comparative Law and Economics Forum. She is past president of the Canadian Law and Economics Association and 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 is on the editorial committee for the Annual Review of Law and Social Science and previously served on the editorial boards for Law and Social Inquiry and the University of Toronto Law Journal.
Professor Hadfield is a Senior Policy Advisor for OpenAI in San Francisco, and an advisor to courts 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 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, and the Dubai Courts of the Future Forum.
Gillian Hadfield