Gillian Hadfield

Gillian Hadfield is the Richard L. and Antoinette Kirtland professor of law and professor of economics at the University of Southern California. She studies the design of legal and dispute resolution systems in advanced and developing market economies; the markets for law, lawyers and dispute resolution; contract law and theory; economic analysis of law; and regulation of legal markets and legal profession. She is the director of the USC Center for Law and Social Science. She teaches Contracts; Advanced Contracts: Strategic Analysis and Advice; and Legal Design.

Hadfield joined the USC Gould faculty in 2001. Her recent publications include Rules for a Flat World: Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent It for a Complex Global Economy (Oxford University Press 2016); “How to Regulate Legal Services to Promote Access, Innovation and the Quality of Lawyering” (with Deborah Rhode) (Hastings Law Journal 2016); “The Microfoundations of the Rule of Law” (with Barry Weingast) (Annual Review of Political Science 2015); “Building Legal Order in Ancient Athens” (with Federica Carugati and Barry Weingast) (Journal of Legal Analysis 2015); “Innovating to Improve Access: Changing the Way Courts Regulate Legal Markets” (Daedalus 2014).

Hadfield holds a BAH from Queen’s University, a JD from Stanford Law School and an MA and PhD in Economics from Stanford University. She served as clerk to Chief Judge Patricia Wald on the U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit. Prior to joining the faculty at USC, she was on the law faculty at the UC Berkeley, and the University of Toronto, and a member of the faculty of the Global Law School at New York University and the European School for New Institutional Economics. Hadfield 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 in the fall of 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. She is a member of the American Law Institute and of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on the Future of Technology, Values, and Policy and previously on the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Justice.


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(c) Stanford Legal Design Lab, 2017