Regulation and Emerging Technologies

• Semester: Spring 2026
• Course ID: 296W
• Credit Hours: 2
• Unique: 29915

Description

Technological innovation is reshaping financial services at a pace that challenges both markets and the law. Accelerating capabilities are disintermediating and disrupting existing business models and enabling the emergence of entrepreneurial new markets, products and 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 technologies: the development of blockchain distributed ledger applications, and advances in artificial intelligence. Our study begins with an overview of administrative approaches to regulation, and we will 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 central theme will be tension between fostering innovation and protecting against risks to market integrity, investor and consumer protection and individual autonomy. We will consider the challenges of developing appropriate regulatory responses to applications of rapidly evolving technologies, and 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.