Prof. Jane Bailey is a Faculty member at the Centre for Law, Technology and Society, and a Full Professor within the Faculty of Law, Common Law Section at the University of Ottawa.
Professor Jane Bailey’s research relates to the inter-related privacy and equality impacts of existing and emerging technologies in digitally networked environments, focusing on their disproportionately negative effects on communities already marginalized by oppressions such as misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, colonialism, and their intersections. She has spoken, written and published on a variety of topics, including technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV), text and image based sexual abuse, digital hate propagation, corporate participation in TFGBV, young people’s experiences with TFGBV, girls’ and young women’s experiences of the digital world, education technology, technology and access to justice, privacy, free expression and consent.
Professor Bailey and Dr Jacquelyn Burkell co-lead Rethinking Consent in Light of Scientific and Technological Developments, a 4-year initiative funded by an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Rethinking Consent focuses on engaging Canadians in dialogue about the inadequacy of the individual consent model (ICM) to protect privacy and equality in an era of AI. Its goal is to produce citizen-informed and equality-enhancing reforms of and alternatives to the ICM that better address the collective implications of digital technologies, especially for members of marginalized communities.
She previously co-led The eQuality Project (with Dr. Valerie Steeves), a 10-year SSHRC-funded Partnership initiative examining young people’s experiences with privacy and equality in a digitally networked environment and the role of technology corporations in perpetuating technology-facilitated violence; The eGirls Project (with Dr. Valerie Steeves), a 3-year SSHRC-funded Partnership Development initiative on girls’ and young women’s experiences online; and working groups in Towards Cyberjustice and The ACT Project, SSHRC-funded Partnership initiatives led by Professor Karim Benyehklef (Université de Montréal) focused on technology’s impact on access to justice and the rights and autonomy of justice system stakeholders.
Before becoming a professor at uOttawa in 2002, Professor Bailey completed her LL.M. at the University of Toronto, practiced litigation with Torys LLP in Toronto, and served as a law clerk to the Honourable Mr. Justice John Sopinka at the Supreme Court of Canada. Her litigation experience includes acting on matters relating to unlawful search of political protesters, on the first Internet hate propagation case to come before a Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, and acting as lead counsel for the Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) in its interventions before the Supreme Court of Canada in two decisions related to voyeurism - Jarvisand Downes.