Position: Associate Professor of Law at the University of Ottawa

Links: Website

Expertise Areas: Law, Philosophy and Media Studies

Contact: iankerr@uottawa.ca

Bio:

Prior to his appointment to the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa in 2000, Ian Kerr held a joint appointment in the Faculty of Law, the Faculty of Information & Media Studies and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Western Ontario. His devotion to teaching has earned six awards and citations, including the Bank of Nova Scotia Award of Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the University of Western Ontario’s Faculty of Graduate Studies’ Award of Teaching Excellence, and the University of Ottawa’s AEECLSS Teaching Excellence Award. Professor Kerr currently teaches a graduate seminar in the LLM concentration in law and technology (Technoprudence: Legal Theory in an Information Age), as well as a unique seminar offered each year during the month of January in Puerto Rico that brings students from very different legal traditions together to exchange culture, values, and ideas and to unite in the study of technology law issues of global importance (TechnoRico). Professor Kerr also teaches in the areas of moral philosophy and applied ethics, internet and ecommerce law, contract law and legal theory.

In 2001, Professor Kerr was awarded the Canada Research Chair in Ethics, Law and Technology. He has published writings in academic books and journals on ethical and legal aspects of digital copyright, automated electronic commerce, artificial intelligence, cybercrime, nanotechnology, internet regulation, ISP and intermediary liability, online defamation, pre-natal injuries and unwanted pregnancies. His current program of research includes two large projects: (i) On the Identity Trail, supported by one of the largest ever grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, focusing on the impact of information and authentication technologies on our identity and our right to be anonymous; and (ii) An Examination of Digital Copyright, supported by a large private sector grant from Bell Canada and the Ontario Research Network in Electronic Commerce, focusing on various aspects of the current effort to reform Canadian copyright legislation, including the implications of such reform on fundamental Canadian values including privacy and freedom of expression.

Dr. Kerr is a member of the Law Society of Upper Canada, the Academic Coordinating Committee of the Centre for Innovation Law and Policy, the Centre for Ethics and Values, the Canadian Association of Law Teachers, the Canadian Bar Association, and the Uniform Law Commission of Canada’s Special Working Group on Electronic Commerce. He is an associate editor of Kluwer’s Electronic Commerce Research Journal, a guest editor for Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments (MIT Press), and sits as a member on the Advisory Board of the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic and on the Advisory Board of Butterworths’ Canadian Internet and E-Commerce Law Newsletter. He is also co-author of Managing the Law (Prentice Hall), a business law text used by thousands of students each year at universities across Canada.

Publications:

Books

Kerr, Ian R., Mitchell McInnes, and J. Anthony VanDuzer. 2003. Managing the Law: The Legal Aspects of Doing Business. Toronto, Canada: Pearson Education

Kerr, Ian R., Mitchell McInnes, and J. Anthony VanDuzer. 2007. Managing the Law: The Legal Aspects of Doing Business, 2nd edition. Toronto, Canada: Pearson Education

Kerr, Ian R., Mitchell McInnes, and J. Anthony VanDuzer. 2010. Managing the Law: The Legal Aspects of Doing Business, 3rd edition. Toronto, Canada: Pearson Education

Kerr, Ian R., Mitchell McInnes, and J. Anthony VanDuzer. 2013. Managing the Law: The Legal Aspects of Doing Business. 4th edition. Toronto, Canada: Pearson Education

Book Chapters

Kerr, Ian R. 2002. “Personal relationships in the Year 2000: Me and My ISP.” In No Person Is an Island: Personal Relationships of Dependence and Independence. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press

Kerr, Ian R. 2002. “Online Service Providers, Fidelity and the Duty of Loyalty.” In Ethics and Electronic Information, edited by Thomas Mendina and Barbara Rockenbach. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland Press

Kerr, Ian R. 2004. “The Role of ISPs in the Investigation of Cybercrime.” In Information Ethics in an Electronic Age: Current Issues in Africa and the World, edited by Thomas Mendina and Johannes Britz. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland Press

Kerr, Ian R. 2004. “Should Law Protect the Technologies that Protect Copyright?” In Information Ethics in an Electronic Age: Current Issues in Africa and the World, edited by Thomas Mendina and Johannes Brtiz. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland Press

Kerr, Ian R. 2005. “If Left to Their Own Devices… How DRM and Anti-Circumvention Laws Can Be Used to Hack Privacy.” In In the Public Interest: The Future of Canadian Copyright Law, edited by Michael Geist. Toronto: Irwin Law

Kerr, Ian R., and Alex Cameron. 2005. “Nymity, P2P & ISPs: The Implications of BMG (Canada) v Doe.” In Privacy and Technologies of Identity: A Cross-Disciplinary Conversation, edited by K. J. Strandburg and D.S. Raicu. New York: Springer

Kerr, Ian R. 2007. “To OBSERVE AND PROTECT? How Digital Rights Management Systems Threaten Privacy and What Policy Makers Should Do About It.“ Forthcoming in Intellectual Property and Information Wealth: Copyright and Related Rights (vol. 1), edited by Peter Yu. Praeger Publishers.

Kerr, Ian R., and Timothy Caulfield. 2007. “Emerging Health Technologies.” In Canadian Health Law and Policy, 3rd edition, edites by Jocelyn Downie, Timothy Caulfield, Colleen Flood, 509-538. Toronto: Butterworths

Kerr, Ian R., and Daphne Gilbert. 2009. “Deputizing the Private Sector? ISPs as Agents of the State.” In Desafíos del derecho a la intimidad y a la protección de datos personales en los albores del siglo XXI. Perspectivas del derecho latinoamericano, europeo y norteamericano.

Kerr, Ian R. 2009. “The Strange Return of Gyges’ Ring.” In Privacy, Identity, and Anonymity: Lessons from the Identity Trail, edited by Ian Kerr, Valerie Steeves and Carole Lucock. Oxford University Press

Kerr, Ian R. 2009.“The Internet Of People? Reflections on the Future Regulation of Human-Implantable Radio Frequency Identification.” In Privacy, Identity, and Anonymity: Lessons from the Identity Trail, edited by Ian Kerr, Valerie Steeves and Carole Lucock. Oxford University Press

Kerr, Ian R. 2010. “Digital Locks and the Automation of Virtue” in From “Radical Extremism” to “Balanced Copyright”: Canadian Copyright and the Digital Agenda, edited by Michael Geist. Toronto: Irwin Law

Kerr, Ian R., and Jennifer Barrigar. 2011. “Privacy, Identity and Anonymity.” In International Handbook of Surveillance Studies, edited by Kristie Ball, Kevin Haggerty and David Lyon, 386-395. London, UK: Routledge

Kerr, Ian R. 2013. “Prediction, Presumption, Preemption: The Path of Law After the Computational Turn.” In Privacy, Due Process and the Computational Turn: The Philosophy of Law Meets the Philosophy of Technology, edited by Mireille Hildebrandt and Ekaterina De Vries. London, UK: Routledge

Ian Kerr in the News: