Dr. Sophie Nunnelley is a Faculty member at the Centre for Law, Technology and Society and an Assistant Professor within the Faculty of Law, Common Law Section at the University of Ottawa.
Dr. Sophie Nunnelley’s scholarship addresses pressing issues of health and mental health law and policy, with a focus on consent and capacity, human rights, and the regulation of health artificial intelligence (AI).
A key strand of Dr. Nunnelley’s work examines the intersections of mental health, AI, and law. She was awarded a 2023-2024 AMS Fellowship in Compassion and Artificial Intelligence for the project “Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights Respecting Mental Healthcare: What Role for Law?” which led to a day-long interdisciplinary workshop and published report, Mindful of Machines: Mental Health AI, Rights, and the Role for Law. Her work also investigates the legal implications of mental health chatbots. She has a forthcoming book chapter, “AI and Mental Health: Regulating the Chatbot “Therapist”, in Regulating AI: Canadian Health Law and Policy in Flux, Colleen M. Flood and Catherine Régis eds (Routledge, in press), and is conducting Canadian Foundation for Legal Research-funded research into remedies for chatbot-related harms.
Dr. Nunnelley is a co-investigator on several interdisciplinary research projects examining health-AI, law and policy, including the CIHR-funded project “Optimizing Medical Device Regulation of Artificial Intelligence;” a New Frontiers in Research Fund – Exploration funded project “Disrupting digital risk narratives: Co-designing inclusive AI sexuality guidelines with disabled youth;” in addition to ongoing collaborations with AI and health researchers at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. She has published reports and peer reviewed articles on health AI and law, including as lead author of “Cracking the Code: A Scoping Review to Unite Disciplines in Tackling Legal Issues in Health Artificial Intelligence” (BMJ Health Care & Informatics, 2025).
Dr. Nunnelley was previously an Assistant Professor at the Lincoln Alexander School of Law at Toronto Metropolitan University, and before that the Associate Director of the University of Ottawa Centre for Health Law, Policy and Ethics, where she brought together interdisciplinary researchers to tackle difficult health policy problems, and helped to bring research to policymakers and the public. She was also counsel with the Constitutional Law Branch of the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General, a litigator at Blakes LLP, and served as law clerk to the Hon. Mr. Justice Gonthier at the Supreme Court of Canada.
She holds an SJD from the University of Toronto, where she was a Vanier scholar, and an LL.M. from Yale University where she studied as a Fulbright Scholar.