Professors Bethany Hastie and Alyssa King have been named Queen’s Law’s 2026–27 Research Excellence Scholars, receiving internal research funding to advance projects with national and international impact on workplace technology regulation and offshore legal zones shaping the rule of law.
Professor Hastie, Director, Centre for Law in the Contemporary Workplace, will employ her funding to advance her research on “Technology and the Future Regulation of Work: Collective Agreements as an Incubator for Legal Innovation,” a project for which she was awarded a Killam Research Accelerator Fellowship at The University of British Columbia before joining Queen’s this year. The project investigates how emerging technologies — especially artificial intelligence, automation, and remote work tools — are reshaping the nature of labour and how these developments are being addressed through collective bargaining.
“A growing volume of research documents the changes technology is bringing to the world of work,” Hastie says. “But far less is known about how law and policy are responding to these changes. Collective agreements — negotiated between unions and employers — can adapt quickly compared to general employment legislation, making them a valuable source for identifying emerging regulatory approaches.”
The project will examine recent collective agreements across Canada and comparable jurisdictions to understand how unions and employers are dealing with technological change in practice. Research assistants funded through Hastie’s RES award will conduct a detailed search to retrieve relevant agreements and then review them for provisions addressing technological change. These provisions will be mapped into a matrix to visualize emerging patterns in the regulation of technology at work.
This analysis will be complemented by a comprehensive review of existing literature, exploring key themes such as the dominant risks and challenges new technologies pose, which workers and industries are most affected, and the values and concerns that shape how technological change is discussed. These insights will provide a conceptual foundation for interpreting patterns observed in the collective agreements.
Remote work, automation, and artificial intelligence have been central to major labour negotiations in the past year, highlighting their real time significance. Because many workers who face heightened risks from technological disruption also face barriers to unionization, the findings from this research will be used to craft broader policy and legal reforms that can extend protections to workers outside of unionized environments.
This work will position Hastie as a leading expert on this emerging topic in Canada, generating the potential for real-world impact by sharing her work with legislative and policy actors, unions, legal advocates, and others.
“The project is a timely intervention, not only in academic conversations, but for on-the-ground labour regulation,” Hastie says. “The goal is to craft forward-looking regulatory options capable of safeguarding worker rights and improving labour standards in an era of rapid technological evolution.”
Professor King’s project, “The Rule of Law and the Offshore,” is an in‑depth investigation into how “offshore” legal zones — jurisdictions intentionally situated apart from a state’s ordinary legal system — shape the rule of law both within these zones and in the states that create them. Such offshore regimes may or may not be physically remote but in all cases, they are legally distinct, operating outside the full reach of domestic institutions.
“Offshore legal arrangements have historical precedents in imperial governance but have taken on renewed significance in the contemporary global legal landscape,” King says. Modern examples range from special economic zones equipped with independent commercial courts to emerging “network cities,” as well as state practices of outsourcing asylum processing to third countries. The U.S. use of Guantanamo Bay to hold terrorism suspects and refugees illustrates another form of offshore governance. Together, these examples show that offshoring has both “high” and “low” dimensions.
King is especially interested in offshore courts. “In their high form, offshore courts serve to attract foreign investment by promising efficient, elite, and reputationally valuable adjudication free from the burdens of domestic law,” King explains. “In their low form, offshore courts allow governments to limit responsibility, obscure their degree of control, or avoid inconvenient legal or human rights obligations.”
Although offshore courts often assert that they uphold or even strengthen the rule of law, their limited mandate and separation from the main legal order undermine these claims. Drawing on political scientist Ernst Fraenkel’s concept of the “dual state,” King’s research suggests that movement between onshore and offshore regimes can entrench dual structures of legality. King also references the work of former Queen’s Law faculty member Alvin Cheung, a scholar of authoritarianism and the rule of law, to argue that offshore jurisdiction may erode the shared legal understanding necessary for a rule of law. Onshore states create and delimit offshore regimes, yet these regimes may give the public impression of independence while masking the degree of ongoing onshore control.
“This study aims to map how offshore jurisdiction affects access to remedies, governmental compliance with human rights, and the professional habits of judges and officials who operate across borders,” King says. “Offshore practices may ultimately influence how onshore authorities approach rights protection — sometimes strengthening it, sometimes weakening it.”
King’s previous research on specialized courts, arbitration, federalism, and “traveling judges” directly informs this project. Her recent article “Ethics for Traveling Judges” explores ethical challenges judges working in offshore jurisdictions face.
King will begin her work on the project this summer as a visitor of the Chair of Human Rights at Friedrich Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg.
About the Research Excellence Scholars program
Launched in 2025, Queen’s Law’s Research Excellence Scholars program supports faculty research with the potential for significant national and international impact. The program provides one‑ or two‑year appointments with internal funding to advance scholarly work. Up to two faculty members are named Research Excellence Scholars each year.
By Tracy Weaver