Oxford Business Law Blog

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and its devastating impact on public health and social and economic systems should force a rethink of public policies directed at the achievement of the United...

Accelerating developments are being observed in machine learning (ML) technology as the capacities for data capture and ever-increasing computer processing power have significantly improved. This is...

The annual report, like other regulatory filings, is more than a legal requirement; it provides an opportunity for public companies to communicate their financial health, promote their culture and...

The increasing use of financial technologies (FinTech) by market participants has fostered a discussion among public authorities on the use of similar technologies for regulatory (RegTech) and...

Rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have tremendous implications for the economy as well as the society at large. Particularly machine learning as general-purpose technology has the...

In 2017, Upstart, a US-based alternative lender using big data and machine learning to predict creditworthiness, received a No Action Letter from the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)...

The great American baseball sage, Yogi Berra, is thought to have once remarked: ‘It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future’. That is certainly true, but thankfully the accelerating...

In my paper ‘Cartel Prohibition and Oligopoly Theory in the Age of Machine Learning’ I deal with the application of the cartel prohibition in the light of alleged legal gaps resulting from the surge...

The AI and English Law Launch Conference, hosted at the University of Oxford on the 18th-19th March, introduced themes, issues and questions on the potential and limitations of using artificial...

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...

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...

Cities throughout the world are becoming smarter thanks to AI, big data, the Internet of Things (‘IoT’), and, more recently, blockchain. Smart cities automate administrative decision-making with...

Proprietary, sophisticated computer algorithms are a hidden yet central element of how we work and play today. Businesses use algorithms internally to make decisions and improve their service...