Dr. Carol Liao is Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Business Law at the UBC Allard School of Law. She is also the UBC Sauder Distinguished Scholar of the Dhillon Centre for Business Ethics, UBC Sauder School of Business. Her research focuses on corporate law and sustainability, climate governance, gender and racial justice. Dr. Liao is Principal Co-Investigator of the Canada Climate Law Initiative, dedicated to advancing director knowledge on the latest in climate science and fiduciary obligation. She is the recipient of the Influential Women in Business Award from Business in Vancouver, the Women of the Year Award (Equity and Inclusion Champion) from BCBusiness Magazine and was named as one of the top 100 Most Powerful Women in Canada by the Women’s Executive Network.

An internationally-respected and interdisciplinary scholar, Dr. Liao has delivered over 150 invited talks around the world on sustainable business and has been cited over 75 times in news media on corporate governance, ESG and equity issues. She is a member of two UBC research clusters: Decision Insights for Business & Society and the Future Minerals Working Group, where she and a cross-faculty team lead the Killam award-winning graduate course, Heavy Metal. As Director of the Centre for Business Law she oversees a busy research hub and two experiential learning programs, the RBS Business Law Clinic and NRF Corporate Counsel Externship. She is the editor of two 2022 books, Corporate Law and Sustainability from the Next Generation of Lawyers (McGill-Queen’s University Press) and Innovating Business for Sustainability: Regulatory Approaches in the Anthropocene (with Drs. Beate Sjåfjell and Aikaterini Argyrou, Edward Elgar).

Dr. Liao is committed to community-engaged scholarship. She is featured in the Federation of Asian Canadian Lawyers (FACL) BC documentary But I Look Like a Lawyer (screened at the 26th Annual Vancouver Asian Film Festival) and sits on the FACL BC Advisory Committee. She delivered the closing keynote at the 43rd Annual Women in Law Dinner (transcript) and FACL BC 10th Anniversary Gala (transcript). She is a member of the Solicitors’ Legal Opinions Committee of BC and is a director of the Pacific Canada Heritage Centre – Museum of Migration Society, an anti-racist museum dedicated to broadening the collective memories of historically marginalized groups in the Pacific Northwest.  A past member of the UBC Presidential steering committee for the National Forum on Anti-Asian Racism, Dr. Liao is also a steering committee member for the UBC Centre for Asian Canadian Research Engagement and on the advisory board for The Phil Lind Initiative hosted by the UBC School of Public Policy and Global Affairs.

Before joining UBC, Dr. Liao was a faculty member at the University of Victoria where she received the UVic Law Students’ Society First Year Class Teaching Award. Prior to academia, Dr. Liao was a senior associate in the New York Mergers & Acquisitions Group of Shearman & Sterling LLP, where she represented public and private multinational corporations in a variety of transactional and governance matters. She is a former judicial clerk of the BC Court of Appeal.