Dr Orla Lynskey

Other Staff Involved: Dr Giulia Gentile

This course is available on the LLM (extended part-time), LLM (full-time), MSc in Regulation and University of Pennsylvania Law School LLM Visiting Students. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

This course has a limited number of places and demand is typically high. This may mean that you’re not able to get a place on this course.

This course does not require an in-depth understanding of contemporary computer technology. 

This course examines and discusses topical issues in relation to law and technology systems. We begin by addressing issues relating to network regulation or control including questions such as “can internet-enabled communications be regulated?” and “who is competent to police online content and activity?”. We discuss whether the internet can and should be neutral and politically charged questions regarding regulation of platforms and regulation by platforms. In the second half of the term, we will delve further into these issues through topical examples such as AI and justice, tackling online “harms” and regulating advertising online including influencers.

Students taking the course will be expected to develop knowledge and understanding of the different values brought to bear in the regulation of new media technologies and communities formed through such technologies and the factors leading towards choices of particular values, regulatory institutions and process. Such knowledge and understanding will operate both at the theoretical level and the level of particular examples of regulatory regimes. Students will be expected to apply organisational and analytical skills to the investigation of evidence and problems and show effective communication through written work and seminar discussion. Students shall research an assessed extended essay.

This course will have 20 hours of teaching content in Lent Term. There will be a Reading Week in Week 6 of Lent Term.

Students should submit an essay plan and working bibliography for the assessed essay. All students are expected to contribute to a series of class and online exercises, and to submit one 2,000 word formative essay.

• Murray, Information Technology Law: The Law and Society (OUP, 4th ed, 2019)
• Edwards (ed), Law, Policy and the Internet (Hart, 2018)
• Reed & Murray, Rethinking the Jurisprudence of Cyberspace (Edward Elgar, 2020)
• Frank Pasquale: New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI (Belknap, 2020)
• Murray, The Regulation of Cyberspace (Routledge, 2007)
• Reed, Making Laws for Cyberspace (OUP, 2012)
• Lessig, Code Ver, 2.0 (Basic Books, 2006)

Essay (100%, 8000 words) in the ST.