Prof. Karen Eltis is Faculty member at the Centre for Law, Technology and Society and a Full Professor of Law within the Faculty of Law, Civil Law Section at the University of Ottawa.
A recipient of the Mundell Medal, awarded by the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General for excellence and innovation in legal writing, Professor Karen Eltis specializes in artificial intelligence law and cyberlaw from a comparative perspective. She is particularly interested in democratic institutions and access to justice. She has served as a senior adviser at the National Judicial Institute and has taught at Columbia Law School.
Professor Eltis has also been a research fellow at Princeton University’s Centre for Information Technology Policy and is fluent in five languages. Before joining the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa, she practiced as a litigation lawyer in New York.
Her work on privacy protection has been cited on numerous occasions by the Supreme Court of Canada, notably in the cases A. B. v. Bragg (2012), Québec (Attorney General) v. 9147-0732 Québec Inc. (2020), and Sherman Estate v. Donovan (2021), as well as by other Canadian and foreign courts. Her book Courts, Litigants and the Digital Age (University of Toronto Press) is now in its second edition. She also co-edited the book Defamation Law, Canada, UK, Australia, United States, published by Thomson Reuters.
Professor Eltis is a member of the New York City Bar’s AI Committee and co-author of the Canadian Judicial Council’s “Guidelines for the Use of Artificial Intelligence in Canadian Courts" (2024) These guidelines were cited in one of the world’s first decisions on the use of artificial intelligence by judicial decision-makers.