Dr Martin Husovec

Other staff involved: Dr Edmund Schuster

This course is available on the LLM (extended part-time), LLM (full-time) 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 is to introduce students from a legal background to the specialised legal structure which surrounds e-commerce. The course looks at the specific problems an e-commerce start-up must overcome in order to begin trading, including arranging cloud hosting agreements, designing terms and conditions of service and delivery, and arranging distribution agreements. Also examined will be smart contracts and distributed ledger technology.  From here the course will develop to examine the problems of more mature e-commerce businesses including jurisdiction, payment systems (including cryptocurrency) and access to, and ownership of, data. Classes on Online Dispute Resolution and the regulation of platform and sharing economies will complete the analysis. The course is designed to act as an interface between ICT law and commercial law and practice in that it examines in detail the close sub-set of online transactions which are clearly commercial in nature.

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 4ed (OUP, 2019).

Lodder & Andrew Murray (eds) EU Regulation of E-Commerce: A Commentary (Edward Elgar, 2017).

Millard: Cloud Computing Law (OUP, 2013).

Fox & Green: Cryptocurrencies in Public and Private Law (OUP, 2019).

Finck: Blockchain Regulation and Governance in Europe (CUP, 2018).

Cohen: Between Truth and Power: The Legal Constructions of Informational Capitalism (OUP, 2019).

Susskind: Online Courts and the Future of Justice (OUP, 2019).

Essay (100%, 8000 words).