Digital Transformation in Law

Digital transformation is reshaping how legal and economic systems operate, as technologies like blockchain, artificial intelligence, and smart contracts create new forms of transacting, contracting, and regulating that existing frameworks were not designed to handle. Economists and legal scholars working in this space examine how digitalization affects market structure, distributional outcomes, and the enforceability of rules — asking, for instance, whether smart contracts genuinely reduce transaction costs or simply shift them, and how algorithmic decision-making interacts with existing liability regimes. One pressing open question is how regulatory approaches can keep pace with innovation without entrenching socio-economic inequalities that digital markets can amplify, particularly where access to data or computational resources is unevenly distributed. Ongoing work also grapples with novel assets and data types — including genetic information and energy-usage records — that challenge standard economic categories of property, privacy, and value.

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26,815

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22,602

Keywords

Digital EconomyLegal RegulationGenetic InformationArtificial IntelligenceEnergy EfficiencyBlockchain Technology