Digital Law Policy

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Juris Doctor, Master of Laws, Undergraduate

The rise of complex digital networks and devices pose a series of challenges to law and policy. Long standing legal and regulatory regimes are often difficult to apply to today’s evolving technologies, and law often struggles to keep pace with rapid innovation. The globalization of information and communications networks create political tensions about how to govern information flows across borders. The ability of both firms and governments to collect, store, combine and analyze personal information create valuable new services as well as significant risks to privacy, civil liberties and human rights. The Digital Law and Policy course introduces ongoing and anticipated legal and policy issues for information and communication technologies (ICTs), emphasizing both legal and technological foundations. The course objectives are to give students the foundational skills to analyze legal texts (cases, regulations and statutes), think critically to apply legal principles and identify legal risks to real-life circumstances, communicate effectively about legal and political aspects of technology, engage in the national and global ICT policy debates to come, and firmly understand the underlying technologies from which these issues arise. This course will give a strong introduction to legal analysis and methodology, and will be taught using the case method, which includes case review and hypotheticals to drive the classroom discussion. Assignments will include one mock oral argument (with accompanying written materials), a mid-term exam and a final exam. The course will cover issues related to the Internet and beyond. Topics include governance of network architecture, free expression and access, intellectual property, consumer privacy and security, liability protections for intermediaries, liability for insecure systems and defective information, government surveillance, computer crime, trans-border data flows, international information policy, and regulatory considerations for digital assets. This course is designed to be useful for and accessible to anyone and a legal or technical background is not required.