Dr Allan McCay

Dr Allan McCay is Co Director of The Sydney Institute of Criminology and an Academic Fellow at the University of Sydney Law School.

 

He was commissioned by the Law Society of England and Wales to write the report Neurotechnology, Law and the Legal Profession (2022). This world-first consideration of brain-computer interfaces and other forms of neurotechnology was reported by media sources around the world in over 20 countries, including reports from the BBC and The Times. The Law Society also published his 2023 update, and he is working on another for 2024.

 

As well as many neurotech (and other) publications, Dr McCay is the author of the first peer-reviewed publication on the challenges presented by neurotechnology for human rights in Australia. His first coedited book Free Will and the Law: New Perspectives (2019) is published by Routledge and his second, Neurointerventions and the Law: Regulating Human Mental Capacity (2020) is published by Oxford University Press. 

 

He is a member of the Australian Human Rights Commission Expert Reference Group on Human Rights and Neurotechnology as well as being a member of Standards Australia’s Brain-computer Interface Committee, the Minding Rights Network (an international group of scholars who work on fundamental rights and emerging technologies), and also an Affiliate Member of Macquarie University's Ethics and Agency Research Centre.

 

He is an Associate Editor of the Journal AI & Society and a member of the Law Society of New South Wales Taskforce on AI & other tools and trends shaping the legal profession as well as an Affiliate of Auckland University’s Natural, Artificial, and Organisation Intelligence Institute. 

 

Dr McCay trained as a solicitor in Scotland, practised as a commercial litigator with Baker McKenzie in Hong Kong, and has also been admitted to practice in two Australian jurisdictions.