Oxford Business Law Blog

In mid 2017, having paid little attention to Artificial Intelligence (AI) beyond noticing that it had replaced “globalisation” as the focus of ambitious middle class conversation, my inbox started to...

This conference explores the use of technology in financial markets from the perspectives of finance, law and regulation. The event covers payment systems, cryptocurrencies and property law, digital...

More than a quarter century after civil rights activists pioneered America’s first ridesharing network during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the connections between transportation, innovation, and...

For many financial products, such as loans and insurance policies, companies distinguish between people based on their different risks and returns. However, the ability to distinguish between people...

There has been an explosion of articles in the popular press about the dangers of artificial intelligence (‘AI’). Some fear that machines with human-like intelligence could someday develop goals at...

The arrival of robots, autonomous software agents and so-called 'Internet of Things'-devices challenges existing liability systems. While the operation of legacy products was mostly in the hands of...

The term ‘smart contract’ refers to computer code that is designed automatically to execute contractual duties upon the occurrence of a trigger event. Referring to a 1997 paper by Szabo, the simple...

Recent developments in 'smart' digital technologies, in particular blockchain technology, are changing and challenging the framework in which business is conducted. A prominent feature of the...

This blog post tackles the problem of defining smart contracts. In particular, it reviews the existing definitions of smart contracts in some of the main laws enacted and scholarly articles published...

This article provides an overview of our current project, which aims to contribute to artificial intelligence (AI) research in law. We are preparing a standardised dataset of 100,000 US court cases...

There are important behavioural reasons why financial consumers tend to make suboptimal financial decisions, and financial firms are often in a position to exploit them. So far, however, well-meaning...

Within the academic community, the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has triggered a lively debate regarding whether data subjects have a “right to explanation” of automated decisions made...

Reporters are in the habit of looking at emerging technologies in isolation when describing their benefits, and that’s certainly the case with biometrics, blockchains, smart contracts, artificial...

A ‘black box’ can be described as a system in which the observable elements entail inputs and outputs, but without any understanding of its internal workings. In other words, the black box is opaque...

FinTech is rapidly transforming the financial services sector. Based on a broad range of different new technologies and innovations, it increasingly attracts the interest of national, global and...

Like with any new and hyped topic, the current discussion on smart contracts is rather complex and confusing. I believe that asking What, Who and Why can help to structure the debate and shed some...