Spring 2024 - 59350 - PA 288K - Advanced Topics in Public Policy

REGULATION OF EMERGING TECH
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.
Instruction Mode
FACE TO FACE