Meet Gillian Hadfield: U of T homecoming for renowned law professor and advocate for legal reform and redesign

noreen.rasbach — Wed, 15 Aug 2018 04:00:00 +0000

noreen.rasbach Wed, 08/15/2018 - 00:00

Cutline

Gillian Hadfield, who is rejoining the Faculty of Law, is cross-appointed to the Rotman School of Management and will also serve as a faculty affiliate at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

Sheldon Gordon

Topic

Global Lens

Artificial Intelligence

Faculty of Law

Global

Rotman School of Management

Technology

Vector Institute

Gillian Hadfield, a leading scholar and advocate for legal reform and redesign, is the latest pioneering academic to be drawn by Toronto’s growing reputation as an advanced technology hub.

A native of Oakville, Ont., she rejoins the University of Toronto Faculty of Law after 17 years on faculty at the University of Southern California. She taught at U of T from 1995-2001.

Her research examines how to make law more accessible, effective, and capable of fulfilling its role in delivering the Fourth Industrial Revolution. “Our legal infrastructure is no longer well-adapted to meeting the challenges of technology and globalization,” says Hadfield.

As well as her research interests in legal design to better address the challenges of globalization and digitization, Hadfield also brings experience from the World Economic Forum’s Future Council on Agile Governance. She is also a senior policy adviser to OpenAI, a non-profit AI research company based in San Francisco

In the fall semester, Hadfield will offer a reading course built around her book, Rules for a Flat World: Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent it for a Complex Global Economy (OUP 2017).

The course serves as prerequisite for the Legal Design Lab, a centre of innovation that is one of the first of its kind for law students in Canada. She will teach that course in the spring semester with her husband, Dan Ryan of the Faculty of Information.

The lab encourages students to work in teams and develop a proposal for an app, company or service that addresses a problem in our legal system. “It’s a great opportunity to think creatively and come up with real-world legal solutions,” says Hadfield, who developed the course while visiting at Harvard Law School in 2012 and has been teaching a version of the Legal Design Lab at USC since then.

“I’m excited to be building on an already vibrant legal tech community in Toronto and adding to the growing course offerings available to law students across the country who are interested in building a more innovative legal future.”

Last year, her students in California developed apps to track compliance with parole conditions and an online service to substitute mock juries and in-person legal focus groups. Hadfield also challenged participants in the inaugural Global Legal Hackathon to solve 10 “problems worth solving,” dubbed the Hadfield Challenges.

“How do we adapt our legal and regulatory environments to AI?” asks Hadfield. “That’s a social science and policy question but it’s also an engineering question. How do we build artificially intelligent agents and systems that can learn what the rules are?”

Hadfield will also consider these issues as a faculty affiliate at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

In addition, Hadfield will teach a first-year law course on contracts. At the Rotman School of Management, where she is cross-appointed as a professor of strategic management, she will teach a class on responsible development and governance of artificial intelligence.

Meet U of T Mississauga’s Indigenous Elder-in-Residence

ullahnor — Wed, 05 Apr 2017 19:37:25 +0000

Meet U of T Mississauga’s Indigenous Elder-in-Residence

ullahnor Wed, 04/05/2017 - 15:37

Sheldon Gordon

Author legacy

Sheldon Gordon

Topic

City & Culture

Indigenous

UTM

Undergraduate Education

Conducting teaching circles is a major part of Cat Criger's role as Traditional Indigenous Aboriginal Elder at U of T Mississauga.

As an Indigenous Elder, his role includes performing traditional ceremonies, guiding the community, healing, counselling and advocacy. He draws upon the Indigenous tradition of freestyle learning to give students of diverse backgrounds an awareness of the First Nations' belief system. Typically up to 30 students, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, gather for his two-hour seminar – either indoors or outdoors.

“We discuss traditional cultural teachings, and how they apply to your path in life,” says Criger. “We may discuss how a snake sheds its skin in order to get rid of scars and move forward in life, or we may discuss the meaning of a full moon.”

Criger, 61, was born in St. Catharines, Ont., to a Cayuga Six Nations father and a German-English mother.

“I have mixed DNA, which allows me to connect with many cultures,” he says.

His father served in the Canadian Armed Forces, and the family was posted to West Germany during much of Criger's childhood. They also travelled throughout central Europe and the UK.

Once back in Canada, the family moved from military base to military base. While they were stationed in Manitoba, Criger recalls being beaten by his public school teacher for having greeted him one day in Cree. But, his father taught him to stand up for himself and take pride in his heritage.

After graduating from high school in Petawawa, Ont., Criger attended community college in Toronto in the late 1970s, studying digital communications. He then worked for Litton Industries, a U.S.-owned defence contractor, specializing in missile technology.

“It was rocket science,” he says. “It was an unusual background for an Indigenous kid.”

Criger also worked for a time in Formula One motorcycle racing, test driving Grand Prix-category machines.

By the early 1990s, recalls Criger, “attitudes in Canada towards Indigenous people had changed, and it was cool to be native. I needed to know more about my culture.”

He quit his day job and apprenticed with an Ojibwe Elder. They travelled widely together and spent time with elders of other tribes. Usually, elders are trained within their own tribe, but Criger had the benefit of an inter-cultural experience. At age 40, he received his spirit name Makwa Giizhigad or Sun Bear in a ceremony performed by an Ojibwe Elder from Minnesota.

In 2002, Criger accompanied a friend to an Indigenous studies class at the University of Toronto. Afterwards, the professor invited him to give a guest lecture. That's how his association with U of T began.

He became an Elder-in-Residence and sits on U of T's Council for Aboriginal Initiatives.

Criger now spends four days a week at U of T Mississauga. He estimates the campus has 20 to 30 Indigenous students. Some don't self-identify, he says, because “they're shy to be singled out as the 'token Indian' in the class.”

He and Ken Derry, associate professor, teaching stream of religious studies, co-chair a task force on supporting the Indigenous experience at U of T Mississauga. They are hoping to expand the campus' Indigenous Centre, encouraging more interaction between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students.

“It's a relationship-building concept,” says Criger.