Bio
Emily Laidlaw is a CIGI senior fellow, a Canada Research Chair in Cybersecurity Law and associate professor at the University of Calgary. She researches in the areas of technology regulation, cybersecurity and human rights, with a focus on platform regulation, online harms, privacy, freedom of expression and corporate social responsibility.
Emily’s research spans Canadian, UK, European and international law. As a scholar, she actively contributes to law reform and other advisory work to government and other bodies, with recent projects on online harms, mis- and disinformation, defamation law, intimate image abuse, intermediary liability, content moderation and privacy. She is currently serving as ethics advisor to Calgary City Council.
Emily is also a network director of the Canadian Network on Information and Security and a member of the Institute for Security, Privacy and Information Assurance. She is author of the book Regulating Speech in Cyberspace: Gatekeepers, Human Rights and Corporate Responsibility (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
She co-chaired the expert advisory panel on online safety appointed by the Government of Canada to advise on next steps for the development of legislation to address online harms. As a result of the impact of her work outside academia, Emily was recognized as a Peak Scholar in 2018.
Prior to joining the University of Calgary in 2014, Emily spent almost 10 years in the United Kingdom, where she completed her master’s of law and Ph.D. at the London School of Economics and Political Science and held a tenure-track lectureship with the University of East Anglia Law School. Before undertaking postgraduate studies, Emily practised for several years in Canada as a litigator.