Assistant Professor
New Chancellor Day Hall
3674 Peel Street
Room 506
Montreal, Quebec
Canada H3A 1W9
514-396-1638
jennifer.raso [at] mcgill.ca (Email)
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/jenraso.bsky.social
Publications on SSRN: ssrn.com/author=2160497
Webpage: http://www.jenraso.com
Biography
Jennifer Raso is Assistant Professor at McGill University’s Faculty of Law, a leadership team member with the McGill Collaborative on AI and Society (McCAIS), and a co-convenor of the Global Data Law Interest Group (ICON-S). Her research investigates the relationship between discretion, data-driven technologies, and administrative law. She is particularly intrigued by how humans/non-humans collaborate and diverge as they produce institutional decisions, and the consequences for procedural fairness and substantive justice. Professor Raso has exploredthese issues as the PI on a SSHRC Insight Development Grant project, "Shifting Front Lines in the Digital Welfare State: Coding Canadian Social Assistance Laws," a FRQSC-funded study, "The Norms In Forms: The Challenges of Being ‘Heard’ by the Digital Welfare State,” and as an expert advisor on three international research projects examining digital government (two in the UK, one in Denmark/Norway). At McGill, Professor Raso teaches a range of courses including Regulating AI, Science Technology and the Law, Administrative Process, Law and Poverty, and Foundations of Law.
Before joining McGill, Professor Raso Assistant Professor at the University of Alberta's Faculty of Law, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of New South Wales Faculty of Law, a visiting fellow at the Yale Law School Information Society Project, a visiting researcher at the University of California Berkeley Center for the Study of Law and Society, and a lawyer for the City of Toronto. She obtained an S.J.D. from the University of Toronto, where she was a junior fellow at the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies.
An award-winning socio-legal scholar, Professor Raso has received the Canadian Association of Law Teacher's Scholarly Paper Award (2025), the Canadian Law and Society Association’s Best English-Language Article prize (2018), and the inaugural Richard Hart Prize at the University of Cambridge’s Public Law Conference (2016). Her work has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (both in Canada), the Fondation de Recherche du Québec, and the Endeavour Fellowships Program (Australia).
Employment
- Assistant Professor, McGill University Faculty of Law 2022 - Present
- Assistant Professor, University of Alberta Faculty of Law 2018 - 2022
- Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, UNSW Law 2017 - 2018
- Lawyer, City of Toronto Legal Services Division 2008 - 2012
Education
- SJD, University of Toronto Faculty of Law, 2018
- LLB, University of Victoria Faculty of Law, 2007
Areas of Interest
Administrative Law, Social Welfare Law, Immigration Law, Digital Borders, Digital and Data-based Government, Algorithmic Decision-Making, Artificial Intelligence (AI) Governance, Socio-Legal Studies.
Recent Publications
Jennifer Raso, "Interoperable AI Regulation," (2025) 23 Canadian Journal of Law and Technology 207-237.
Victoria Adelmant and Jennifer Raso, "Data Entry and Decision Chains: Distributed Responsibility and Bureaucratic Disempowerment in the United Kingdom's Universal Credit Programme," (2025) 45:2 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 415-446.
Jennifer Raso, “Digital Border Infrastructure and the Search for Agencies of the State” in Gavin Sullivan, Fleur Johns, and Dimitri van den Meerssche, eds, Global Governance by Data: Infrastructures of Algorithmic Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2025).
Jennifer Raso, "Regulatory Technologies and Front-Line Decision-Making" in Helen Carr, Edward Kirton-Darling, Jed Meers, and Maria Fernanda Salcedo Repolês (London: Edward Elgar, 2024) 209-225.
Jennifer Raso, "Responsible AI: Binaries that Bind" (2024) 69:4 McGill Law Journal.
Jennifer Raso & Victoria Adelmant, “Bureaucracy” in Jenna Burrell, Ranjit Singh, and Patrick Davison, eds, Datafied State Keywords Project (New York: Data & Society, 2024).
Jennifer Raso, “Smooth Operators, Predictable Glitches: The Interface Governance of Benefits and Borders” (2023) 38:2 Canadian Journal of Law & Society 158-179.
Paul Daly, Jennifer Raso & Joe Tomlinson, “Researching Administrative Law in the Digital World” in Carol Harlow, ed, A Research Agenda for Administrative Law (London: Edward Elgar, 2023) 255-279.
“Implementing Digitalisation in an Administrative Justice Context,” in Marc Hertogh, Richard Kirkham, Robert Thomas, Joe Tomlinson, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Administrative Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022) 521-544.
“AI and Administrative Law,” in Florian Martin-Bariteau & Teresa Scassa, eds, Artificial Intelligence and the Law in Canada (Toronto: LexisNexis Canada, 2021)
“Administrative Law in the Digital World,” with Paul Daly & Joe Tomlinson, in Carol Harlow, ed, Research Handbook on Administrative Law (Edward Elgar, Aldershot, 2021) 163-184.
“Unity in the Eye of the Beholder? Reasons for Decision in Theory and Practice in the Ontario Works Program,” (2020) 70:1 University of Toronto Law Journal 1-39.
“The In-Between Space of Administrative Justice: Reconciling Norms at the Front-Lines of Social Assistance Agencies,” in Jason Varuhas & Shona Wilson Stark, eds, The Frontiers of Public Law (Oxford: Hart, 2020), 471-498.
“Governing Infrastructure in the Age of the ‘Art of the Deal’: Logics of Governance and Scales of Visibility,” with Mariana Valverde & Fleur Johns, (2018) 41:S1 PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 118-132.
“Displacement as Regulation: New Regulatory Technologies and Front-Line Decision-Making in Ontario Works,” (2017) 32:1 Canadian Journal of Law & Society 75-95.
“Tranchemontagne and the Administration of Rights: Lessons from the Game of Jurisdiction,” (2017) 13 Journal of Law & Equality 31-59.
