Peter Wills

Assistant Professor

Law, Faculty of

Fredericton

p.wills@unb.ca



Research interests

  • AI governance & policy
  • Tort law & other private rights of action
  • Class proceedings

Biography

Peter joined UNB Faculty of Law in 2026, after completing his DPhil from Oxford University. He holds an LL.M. from Cambridge, a J.D. from Harvard, and an M. Eng (Civil) and Hons B.A. (Peace and Conflict Studies) from the University of Toronto.

Prior to joining UNB, Peter served as a judicial law clerk at the British Columbia Court of Appeal and Supreme Court of Canada, and worked for stints as a plaintiff-side class action lawyer, as a researcher at the Centre for Governance of AI (GovAI), as an instructor at the Lincoln Alexander School of Law, as a student at Osler Hoskin & Harcourt LLP's Research Department, at the Ontario Ministry of Finance, and at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, as a transport planner, and as a programmer of cupcake-decorating robots. He is a member of the Ontario bar.

Peter has a catholic interest in law and legal studies, and has found himself often preoccupied by principal-agent problems and the appropriate roles of the various emanations of the state in resolving conflicts. He has as-yet-unfulfilled interests in empirical legal studies, corporate governance, and insolvency law. He takes a break from thinking about law by continuing various computer programming projects, most notably iDissent, a browser extension he made to improve Canadian legal research.

Courses taught

  • Civil Procedure
  • Conflict of Laws

Selected papers

The Legacy of Uber v Heller SSRN preprint P Wills & M Collins, (forthcoming) __ Can Bus LJ __

Libel via Language Models P Wills, (2025) 62:1 Osgoode Hall LJ 153

Care for Chatbots P Wills, (2025) 58:2 UBC L Rev 525

The Prudent Parliament and s 24(1) P Wills & M.A. Rowe, (2024) 33:2 Const Forum Const 39

The Wrong of Constructive Expropriation P Wills, (2024) 61:4 Alta L Rev 807

Open Problems in Technical AI Governance A Reuel, B Bucknall et al. (2025) Transactions on Machine Learning Research

IDs for AI Systems A Chan et al. (2024) ArXiv

Arbitration and the IRSSA P Wills, (2022) 45:3 Man LJ 86

Imagining Resilient Courts: from COVID-19 to the Future of Canada's Court System | SSRN preprint D Matyas, P Wills, & B Dewitt, (2022) 48:1 Can Pub Pol'y 186

Truthful AI: Developing and governing AI that does not lie O Evans et al. (2021)