Lilian Edwards is a leading academic in the field of Internet law. She has taught information technology law, e-commerce law, privacy law and Internet law at undergraduate and postgraduate level since 1996 and been involved with law and artificial intelligence (AI) since 1985.

She worked at the University of Strathclyde from 1986–88 and the University of Edinburgh from 1989–2006. She became Chair of Internet Law at the University of Southampton from 2006–8 and then Professor of Internet Law at the University of Sheffield until late 2010, when she returned to Scotland to become Professor of E-Governance at the University of Strathclyde, while retaining close links with the renamed SCRIPT (AHRC Centre) at the University of Edinburgh.

She is the editor and major author of Law, Policy and the Internet, one of the leading textbooks in the field of Internet law. She won the Future of Privacy Forum award in 2019 for best paper (‘Slave to the Algorithm’ with Michael Veale) and the award for best non-technical paper at FAccT in 2020, on automated hiring. In 2004 she won the Barbara Wellberry Memorial Prize in 2004 for work on online privacy where she invented the notion of data trusts, a concept which ten years later has been proposed in EU legislation. She is a partner in the Horizon Digital Economy Hub at Nottingham, the lead for the Alan Turing Institute on Law and AI, a Turing fellow, and a fellow of the Institute for the Future of Work. At Newcastle, she is the theme lead in the data NUCore for the Regulation of Data. Edwards has consulted for, inter alia, the EU Commission, the OECD, and WIPO.