Valerio De Stefano, PhD, is a Full Professor of Law. He joined Osgoode in January 2022 and was then appointed as the inaugural Canada Research Chair in Innovation, Law and Society. From October 2017 to December 2021, he was the BOF-ZAP Research Professor of Labour Law at the Institute for Labour Law and the Faculty of Law of the University of Leuven (KU Leuven) in Belgium.
Valerio De Stefano read law at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy, where he obtained a master’s degree in 2006 and later received his doctoral degree (2011). At Bocconi University, he served as a postdoctoral researcher between 2011 and 2014 while also being a part-time associate in an international law firm. From 2014 to 2017, he worked as an officer of the International Labour Organization in Geneva. During his career, he was a visiting academic at the University College London (UCL), a postdoctoral member of Clare Hall College at the University of Cambridge (2013), a Distinguished Speaker for Spring 2018 at the “William C. Wefel Center for Employment Law” at Saint Louis University Law School (2018), and a Senior Fellow (Melbourne Law Masters) at the University of Melbourne (2019).
In 2018, Professor De Stefano was awarded an Odysseus Grant from the Research Foundations—Flanders (FWO) amounting to 880,000 Euro for an interdisciplinary research project on the working conditions and labour protection of platform workers. From 2020 to 2022, he was also the principal investigator at the KU Leuven of a Horizon2020 Grant about in-work poverty.
Since 2024, Valerio De Stefano is the General Editor of the Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal (CLLPJ). He also regularly publishes articles in major specialised academic journals. In 2016, he was the guest editor of a special issue of the CLLPJ on “Crowdsourcing, the Gig-Economy, and the Law”. In 2019, he was the guest editor of a special issue of the same journal on “Automation, Artificial Intelligence, and Labour Protection”. He also was the co-editor of a special issue on “Testing the ‘Personal Work’ Relation: New Trade Union Strategies for New Forms of Employment” published by the European Labour Law Journal and of a special issue of Transfer on “Regulating AI at work: labour relations, automation, and algorithmic management”. In 2022, with professor Antonio Aloisi, he published “Your Boss Is an Algorithm. Artificial Intelligence, Platform Work and Labour” (Hart Publishing), a monograph about algorithmic management and artificial intelligence at work.
He is an Editorial Adviser of the International Labour Review.
Professor De Stefano acted as a consultant for the International Labour Office, the European Parliament, Eurofound, the Joint Research Center of the EU Commission and national governments. His research is also frequently referred to by governments and international organisations, including the International Labour Organisation, the OECD, the European Commission, and the European Parliament, and has been cited by courts, parliamentary bills, policy reports, employers’ and workers’ organisations, and media worldwide.
In addition to numerous academic conferences, lectures, and seminars, he was invited to speak as an expert on the labour protection of new forms of work as well as technology and labour rights at the European Parliament, the European Social and Economic Committee, the ILO, the OECD, and the Canada-EU dialogue on employment, social affairs and decent work. He is a member of the OECD’s Network of Experts on AI (One AI). He was the recipient of a KU Leuven Service to Society Award (Maatschappijprijs) in 2020, a York Research Award in 2023, and an Osgoode Teaching Award in 2024.
Research Interests: Labour Law, Employment Law, Law and Technology, Artificial Intelligence and Law, Algorithmic Management, Artificial Intelligence and Work, Digitalisation and Society, Platform Work, Non-Standard Employment, International and Comparative Labour law.
Graduate Research Supervision (LLM, PhD): Professor De Stefano is willing to supervise in Labour and Employment Law, with a particular interest in Artificial Intelligence and Work, the intersection of Law and Technology, Platform Work, and International and Comparative Labour law.