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Staff Profile

Professor Lilian Edwards

Prof of Law, Innovation & Society

Background

Lilian Edwards is a leading academic in the field of Internet law. She has taught information technology law, e-commerce law, privacy law and Internet law at undergraduate and postgraduate level since 1996 and been involved with law and artificial intelligence (AI) since 1985.

She worked at the University of Strathclyde from 1986–1988 and the University of Edinburgh from 1989 to 2006. She became Chair of Internet Law at the University of Southampton from 2006–2008, and then Professor of Internet Law at the University of Sheffield until late 2010, when she returned to Scotland to become Professor of E-Governance at the University of Strathclyde, while retaining close links with the renamed SCRIPT (AHRC Centre) at the University of Edinburgh. She resigned from that role in 2018 to take up a new Chair in Law, Innovation and Society at Newcastle University. She also has close links with the Oxford Internet Institute.

She is the editor and major author of Law, Policy and the Internet, one of the leading textbooks in the field of Internet law (Hart, 2018). She won the Future of Privacy Forum award in 2019 for best paper ("Slave to the Algorithm" with Michael Veale) and the award for best non-technical paper at FAccT* in 2020, on automated hiring. In 2004 she won the Barbara Wellberry Memorial Prize in 2004 for work on online privacy  where she invented the notion of data trusts, a concept which ten years later has been proposed in EU legislation. She is a partner in the Horizon Digital Economy Hub at Nottingham, the lead for the Alan Turing Institute on Law and AI,  and a fellow of the Institute for the Future of Work.  At Newcastle, she is the theme lead in the data NUCore for the Regulation of Data. She currently holds grants from the AHRC and the Leverhulme Trust. Edwards has consulted for inter alia  the EU Commission, the OECD, and WIPO.

Edwards co-chairs GikII, an annual series of international workshops on the intersections between law, technology and popular culture.



Research
My research revolves generally around the regulation of new technologies but in particular the Internet, and the Internet of Things. In recent years I have moved towards specialisation in privacy and data protection, especially as applied to AI and algorithms. Beyond privacy, I am interested in algorithmic transparency and justice; and regulation of platforms, especially social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. I am a recognised expert in European intermediary liability and the E-Commerce Directive. I have spent most of 2020-21 working on legal and social aspects of COVID-19 related technologies such as contact tracing apps and workplace surveillance. I am also working on control of digital assets after death; and generally on the future of data driven work.
Publications