Suzie Dunn

Suzie Dunn is an Assistant Professor at Dalhousie’s Schulich School of Law where she teaches contracts and judicial decision making, law and technology, intellectual property, and legal ethics.

In 2021-2022 she coached Dalhousie’s Harold G Fox Moot winning moot team.

While studying for her PhD at the University of Ottawa she acted as a part time professor where she taught contracts law and the law of images. She was awarded a prize in 2021 for excellence in part-time teaching.

Her research centers on the intersections of gender, equality, technology and the law, with a specific focus the non-consensual distribution of intimate images, deepfakes, and impersonation in digital spaces. She was awarded the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Scholarship for her PhD research. In 2021, she was the recipient of the Greenberg Prize for Feminist Research.

As an innovative thinker with a deep passion for human rights and technology, she has published and presented her work both nationally and internationally on issues including the importance of internet connectivity for northern youth, the application of Canadian law to deepfake technology, and civil responses to the non-consensual distribution of intimate images.

In 2018, she worked as a policy advisory with the Digital Inclusion Lab at Global Affairs Canada in drafting two international commitments to end gender-based violence in digital contexts, including the G7’s “Charlevoix Commitment to End Sexual and Gender-Based Violence, Abuse and Harassment in Digital Contexts” and the United Nations Human Rights Committee’s resolution titled “Accelerating Efforts to Eliminate Violence against Women and Girls: Preventing and Responding to Violence against Women and Girls in Digital Contexts”, both of which were adopted that year.

Suzie was part of the legal team that supported CIPPIC’s intervention in R v Jarvis and R v Downes. The Jarvis case involved a high-school teacher who had used a secret camera pen to take images of his female students for a sexual purpose. In its 2019 decision, the Supreme Court of Canada clarified the term “reasonable expectation of privacy” in the criminal voyeurism provision. The SCC found that the girls in this case did have a reasonable expectation of privacy in those circumstances and set out a contextual analysis for future cases. This was a key case in the jurisprudence related to privacy and image-based abuse. Downes, another voyeurism case, will be before the Supreme Court in the fall of 2022.

Outside of academia, Suzie Dunn has worked with several organizations that address gender equality or technology issues. She currently sits on advisory committee with the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund that addresses issues related to technology facilitated violence. She is a senior fellow at CIGI where she is working on a global project to combat online gender-based violence. She assisted the British Columbia Society of Transitions Houses develop their Tech-Safety Toolkit. She is also an associate member of the University of Ottawa’s Centre for Law Technology and Society.

She was called to the Ontario bar in 2016.