LLM Law, Technology and Innovation

Analyses the suitability of existing and emerging regulatory models with respect to new technologies, examines the need for new regulatory regimes, and considers regulatory issues via a series of case studies using an interdisciplinary lens.

The module responds to scholarly and professional needs for legal education in the field of regulating technologies. What propels these needs is a shift towards automated decision-making and algorithmic regulation (e.g., in law enforcement, the justice system, or public service delivery), driven by advances in computing power, machine learning and big data analytics.

Given the rapid changes in process across all industries, this module is important in equipping graduates from legal and non-legal backgrounds with the tools required to properly respond to the issues raised by rapid innovation, and to properly employ ideas surrounding the questions of innovation while building their leadership skills.

An understanding of computing systems has become an increasingly essential part of what lawyers do. But the possibilities for lawyers with computational literacy exceeds are more than simply keeping up in the environment in which they operate. Lawyers with coding skills can function at the intersection of computer science and law. This module will teach students the ability to code basic projects using the R and Python programming languages and offer the opportunity to participate in a hackathon.

Increasingly, understanding data science is an essential part of what lawyers do. Machine learning raises various legal concerns (e.g. regarding algorithmic bias), particularly where machine learning has legal application (e.g. judicial decision-making).

The premise of this module is that one cannot fully understand algorithmic bias without understanding algorithms. This module therefore offers an introduction to work with big data and using it to make predictions.

Students will construct one of the most politically-maligned applications of big data in the modern era – a predictive policing tool – and to the best of their ability fashion it to avoid replicating bias. Then, having done so, they will examine how bias could have crept into the devices they have built and develop a set of cautions they would provide to anyone who might make use of their tools.

Cyber crime, cyber security and anti-theft law is a significant and growing challenge in both technology and law. This module will provide an overview of the legal framework for the regulation of digital information and associated technology, in the context of the commodification of data and the applicable legal rules in both domestic and international law.

In spite of the widespread presence of intellectual property in law schools, in industry and the media, even basic issues in intellectual property remain misunderstood. This module, by providing students with the skills and information to navigate a world of intellectual property protection, will consider cutting-edge technologies, such as machine learning and generative AI, and enable students to effectively protect and assert their rights as well as avoid liability for infringing those of others.

Recent legal developments relating to AI demonstrate a public concern (and desire) for new regulatory approaches to digital technologies that incorporate any form of automated analysis and/or decision-making, particularly when deployed by the state in ‘high-stakes’ areas such as policing and migration.

This module analyses developments and challenges in public law arising from the use of algorithmic decision-making systems - including both constitutional and administrative law - via a range of legal, constitutional and cross-disciplinary methods to equip students with the capacity to think critically about how the law applies in this area and to engage critically with complex legal issues arising from algorithmic decision-making in the real-world.

This module responds to a significant demand for legal experts with an understanding of the commercial stakes of technology related issues. It will apply a law and economics framework to legal issues related to new technology and digital markets, and evaluate the usefulness of the L&E framework and its positive and normative limits.

The potentially maleficent impact of digital technologies on human rights creates a real urgency for understanding this connection, but there is also a pressing need to study these technologies’ beneficent effects on human rights, an area that is garnering growing attention from human rights researchers and NGOs. Emerging scholarly discussions on the development of digital human rights, or on the hybridisation of public and private governance of digital technologies and attending debates on the vertical and horizontal effects of human rights law, will also be addressed in this class.