Professor Austin's research and teaching interests include privacy law, property law, and legal theory. She is published in such journals as Legal Theory, Law and Philosophy, Theoretical Inquiries in Law, Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, and Canadian Journal of Law and Society. She is co-editor (with Dennis Klimchuk) of Private Law and the Rule of Law (Oxford University Press, 2015), in which distinguished Canadian and international scholars take on the general understanding that the rule of law is essentially only a doctrine of public law and consider whether it speaks to the nature of law more generally and thus also engages private law.
Professor Austin's privacy work has been cited numerous times by Canadian courts, including the Supreme Court of Canada. She is also active in a number of public policy debates in Canada. Most recently, she collaborated on a report for the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada entitled Seeing Through the Cloud: National Jurisdiction and Location of Data, Servers, and Networks Still Matter in a Digitally Interconnected World. Previous policy work includes consulting for the Canadian Judicial Council on their Model Policy for Access to Court Records in Canada.
Professor Austin is currently a member of the International Advisory Panel for the American Law Institute's project, Restatement of the Law (Fourth), Property.