Academic Year 2021/2022

Learning outcomes

By the end of the course, each student will acquire competences to understand technological phenomena that involve her/his future activity as a legal expert, including blockchain, smart contracts, digital signatures, digital identity, digital services in the public administration, legal design, legal data analytics tools, and artificial intelligence as a support tool for legal professionals.

Course contents

The course focuses on acquiring competences in three areas:

1. Legal Design

In this area, each student will acquire the capacity to simplify legal documents, administrative procedures, and contracts, by means of visual and non-visual tools. Formal ontologies will be used to analysis legal concepts at stake and the existing relations among them. Elements of general legal theory are necessary to not compress into a mere picture the simplification, in the light of the risk to deprive the legal act of its meaning during the transformation from textual language to non-textual. Practical laboratories will be carried out.

2. AI and data culture in legal professions

Data society and artificial intelligence are reshaping legal professions due to the introduction of software products that help the legal professional to fulfil her/his tasks. However, it is necessary to govern the principles on which these tools are designed and, by understanding their functioning, elaborate an independent opinion separate from the machine to preserve legal critique capacities. By means of certain software, students will develop analysis skills.

3. Tools that ease the digital transition of legal professions.

Digital transformation is changing legal professions. This area will focus on tools such as electronic identification, trusted certificates, digital signatures, and de-materialisation tools.

Readings/Bibliography

Legal Design

AI and Data

Digital transition

Digital signatures

Teaching methods

In-presence and remote lectures

The course provides in-presence and online lectures according to the modalities described in the following webpage: https://dsg.unibo.it/it/didattica/progetti-e-metodologie-didattiche/modalita-didattiche-presso-il-dsg-nel-i-semestre-a-a-2020-2021

During each lecture, the teaches uses slides, which report a synthesis of the discussed topics, clips, and practical demos.

During the course, topic-specific seminars could be proposed on matters that, due to their timeliness, provide further thinking on the whole subject matters. During these seminars, external experts can integrate the course with a broader perspective on the topics. The course includes the practical laboratories for the development of projects that rely specific software.

Attendance

Attendance to the lectures is not mandatory, yet it is extremely helpful to reach the formative goals of the course, as they allow to quickly understand the terminology, fundamentals, principles, which in turn become the essential elements of an autonomy and critical study of the subject matter. Moreover, attendance allows students to translate theorical fundamentals into practice by means of new and innovative teaching methods.

Assessment methods

Assessments will consist of the evaluations of a group project (no more than 3 members) correlated to a 10-page documentation that will describe project goals, ethical and legal analysis, data analysis, methodologies, argumentation of the initial hypothesis and final results.

The project has to be fully delivered 15 days before the exam date.

Evaluation will consist of a scrutiny of the following aspects:

1. Innovativeness of the project in the fields of legal design, AI, or data analytics;

2. Goal selections and legal soundness;

3. Completeness of the legal, ethical and technical analysis;

4. Correctness of the digital tools adopted to fulfil the project;

5. Use of technical standards adopted at the EU-level;

6. Visualisation of the results for the final user;

7. Argumentation of the hypothesis and the final results;

In groups, each member has to elaborate a specific aspect to be reported during the oral assessment during which the team will present the project and its documentation.

Teaching tools

In the section “Teaching resources” of this page, also reachable via the webpage <https://virtuale.unibo.it/course/>, each student will find a list of information related to the course, teachers’ activities, up-to-date legislation, self-evaluation questionnaires, lecture slides and other materials that support exam preparation.

Teaching tools to be used in the course of exam preparation are.

- Lecture slides that the teacher publishes in the “Teaching resources” section of this page, also reachable via the webpage <https://virtuale.unibo.it/course/>,

- Readings and in-depth materials, mainly proposed to focus and tackle innovative topis in the subject (“Teaching resources” section of this page, also reachable via the webpage <https://virtuale.unibo.it/course/>),

- Lecture log, publishes by the teacher, work in progress, at the end of each lecture (sec. Useful contents). The Log details the list of topics covered, the links to the shown slides, references to the book or additional readings. Students, in particular those not attending the course, are recommended to refer to the sequence of covered topics, as displayed in the Log, to better organise their autonomous study.

Online lectures will be delivered on the official university platform TEAMS

Office hours

See the website of Monica Palmirani

SDGs

Quality education Decent work and economic growth Industry, innovation and infrastructure Partnerships for the goals

This teaching activity contributes to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals of the UN 2030 Agenda.