Law and Digital Commerce

Businesses are increasingly embracing the use of technology in domestic and cross-border operations, such as blockchain and cloud technology, digitalized trade platforms, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things (IoT). Consumers are also increasingly using technology tools to acquire a variety of goods and services. Legal changes are occurring to reflect such developments. It is necessary for lawyers and policymakers to have an understanding of major digital technologies, their commercial applications, and their legal contexts. Students will examine key legal issues arising from such uses, so as to help design forward-looking policies and regulations to deal with such issues.

This unique course aims to provide students with an opportunity to learn about a number of cutting-edge issues relating to commercial uses of digital technologies and the role of law and other policy tools in the digital environment in the cross-border trade context. The issues are selected based on their topicality, feedback from industry, importance to Singapore and ASEAN, and a review of academic and business literature. The course will allow students to develop skills to analyze and conduct cross-disciplinary research on selected issues, prepare reports with their research findings, and exercise creativity to generate useful recommendations to deal with real-world problems. The real-world context of this course will help prepare students for the digital economy work environment, whether in legal practice, a business entity, a regulatory agency, or an international organization.

In the first part of the course, an explanation of relevant legal frameworks will be provided to help students understand the broad context of issues in the digital economy. Students will then be further exposed to major digital technologies, such as distributed ledger and blockchain technology, and artificial intelligence applications in the trade context, including basic features, strengths, and risks of such technologies, related data use, transfer, and storage policies, and other issues during the course. Students will examine a number of topical issues that policymakers and the private sector are grappling with. To promote students’ sense of curiosity and continual self-learning, in the latter part of the course, they will be required to work in groups - under the instructor’s continual guidance - to select relevant topics, conduct legal research and design group papers pertaining to digital technologies and the law in trade, and to generate meaningful recommendations based on their findings. Industry professionals from the public and private sectors will complement the learning experience by providing feedback on students’ ideas. In addition to interactive learning led by the course instructor, students will receive technical, legal, and policy insights from professionals who may be from the fields of commerce, banking, information technology, healthcare, law, and government regulation. Students will therefore benefit from the views of industry professionals from different disciplinary fields and organizations, allowing them to better appreciate the various issues and legal and policy needs.

(A number of past students from this course have been successfully placed in unique and valuable internship positions and in a prestigious international project, as a result of the course experience.)