Law and Technology: Emerita Professor Receives LegalTech Inspiration Award
“I’m thrilled to be recognized by the UIA for my work in the field of law and technology,” says Chicago-Kent College of Law University Distinguished Professor Emerita Lori B. Andrews.
Andrews, who also serves as executive director of Chicago-Kent’s Institute for Science, Law, and Technology, received the 2026 LegalTech Inspiration Award from LexisNexis and the Union Internationale des Avocats (UIA) in recognition of her contributions to the field of law and technology. Five hundred lawyers attended her acceptance speech which was simultaneously translated into French, Spanish, and Arabic at the start of the UIA’s five-day annual meeting in Marrakech.
The UIA is the only major multilingual and multicultural international lawyers’ organization, according to the group’s website. Its LegalTech Inspiration Award recognizes an attorney or organization that brings new ideas to the legal sector and that supports innovation. In presenting the award, the UIA noted, “With her innovative strategies and processes for predicting the legal conflicts that will arise with the implementation of each new technology, she trains lawyers, judges, policymakers, and consumers to assess each new technology.”
Throughout her career, Andrews has explored the legal and ethical questions raised by emerging technologies, from reproductive technologies and genetic testing to social networks and artificial intelligence.
“Right out of law school, I worked on reproductive technology issues, facing questions such as: Can an anonymous egg donor later sue for visitation to the resulting child? If a wealthy man’s barber took a hair and cloned the man, could the child sue the wealthy man for child support?” Andrews says.
Andrews has been a prominent authority on the effects of new technology on the legal sector and individual rights. She was appointed to chair the United States commission that examined the ethical, legal, and social implications of the Human Genome Project, a major scientific initiative to map human DNA that was launched in 1990.
“The project created technologies that would allow a healthy person to learn that they were at a higher risk of cancer or other diseases later in life,” she says. “But that raised privacy and discrimination issues. Could a healthy woman be turned down for a job or insurance just because she had a 30 percent risk of developing breast cancer later in life?”
As digital technologies have evolved, Andrews has continued to examine privacy and individual rights in the context of apps, social networks, and artificial intelligence. She has advocated for legislation to protect individuals in this tech-driven environment and also written a Social Network Constitution, which addresses the privacy issues inherent when law enforcement, insurers, employers, and other authorities surreptitiously gather massive amounts of information that has the potential to harm individuals.
More recently, Andrews’ research has explored the legal and social questions surrounding romantic relationships between people and AI chatbots.
“As a lawyer approaching technology, I always ask: Does this technology add to or detract from human flourishing? And can it be integrated into society consistent with our fundamental values?” Andrews says.
