Accelerating technological innovation is dramatically altering the financial services landscape. By disintermediating and disrupting existing relationships, it is enabling the emergence of new business models, products and market participants. But what are the rules for this revolution? Or are there rules? How can lawyers counsel revolutionary entrepreneurs? How do regulators grapple with the associated challenges? This course will provide students a framework to consider these questions. We will use as our focal points two emerging and potentially transformational technologies: the development of blockchain distributed ledger technologies, and advances in the application of artificial intelligence to financial services. We will begin with administrative models of regulation and use that framework to critically assess the way that regulators have utilized existing authorities to respond to the myriad developments in these fields. Substantive issues will include anti-money laundering, securities and commodities regulation, consumer protection and data privacy. A consistent theme will be the challenges of developing appropriate regulatory responses to applications of rapidly evolving technologies, and, from the other perspective, that of counseling change agents in an ambiguous regulatory environment. This course is taught by a professor with a 35-year regulatory enforcement career that included positions as a senior SEC enforcement official and as a partner in a global law firm representing clients in defense of enforcement actions, and who has deep experience with these challenges from both perspectives.
Schwartz, Erich 