Blockchain and Other Disruptive Business-tech Challenges to the Law

URL study guide

https://studiegids.vu.nl/en/courses/2024-2025/R_IBIT

Course Objective

At the end of this course, students are expected to be able to:
- Understand, at a functional level, how these disruptive technologies work and how they circumvent or defeat traditional regulation.
- Understand and critically evaluate the traditional legal approaches in the areas covered by these disruptive technologies.
- Explain their own well-founded opinion on the tasks and challenges for the law.

Course Content

Blockchain, like other innovations, is a combination of past technologies. But what distinguishes blockchain from most technologies is that it serves as an architecture for online and offline transactions. The inherent transactional nature of blockchain presents a spectrum of challenges and opportunities, the confluence of which is being addressed by various policy initiatives and court decisions. The success of these efforts requires, first and foremost, a good understanding of how blockchain works and how it is governed. The first objective of this course is therefore to provide students with this technical understanding. Students are then introduced to the most commonly used blockchain applications, namely smart contracts, DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations), DeFi (decentralized finance), and NFTs (non-fungible tokens). They explore related legal challenges, regulations, and decisions. They investigate how to shape the law in a way that maximizes the public good. Finally, this course looks at the implications of blockchain outside of its own digital ecosystem. Students are introduced to crypto-crimes and the market dynamics created by Web3. Overall, this course covers aspects of contract, corporate, financial, criminal, privacy, and competition law. It aims to prepare students for tomorrow’s leading positions in the field.

Teaching Methods

Weekly lectures: students are expected to attend *all
- lectures and to have read the assignments before entering the classroom. The lectures will build on top of these readings. Three seminars: students are expected to attend *all
- seminars. They are expected to have prepared assignments. They are also expected to give constructive feedback to other students.

Method of Assessment

- Paper #1: in the tutorials, you will have to give a presentation, either alone or together (instructions will be posted on Canvas). Before the end of the week of your presentation, you will have to turn in a paper on the topic you presented, again, either alone or together. The paper should be 1000-1200 words. It will be worth 50% of your final grade.
- Paper #2: you will write an individual paper at the end of all lectures (instructions will be posted on Canvas). The paper should be 1000-1200 words. It is worth 50% of your final grade.

Literature

The literature will be made available through Canvas

Target Audience

Apart from regular students, the course is also available for:
- Students from other universities/faculties
- Exchange students
- Contractor (students who pay for one course) Courses from a master at the faculty can only be taken as a secondary course if you have a diploma that gives access to the relevant Master/specialization and if you are enrolled in a master.