The Australian National University (ANU)’s Collage of Law will launch two new courses new in its Master’s program in the next year that will let the students explore the effects of blockchain technology on the legal fields.
The project is made possible with the support of Ripple’s University Blockchain Research Initiative (UBRI)—an initiative in which Ripple collaborates with leading universities around the world to support and accelerate academic research, technical development and innovation in blockchain, cryptocurrency and digital payments.
A blog post published on Ripple’s official website on Tuesday , March 31, revealed the news. According to the Ripple, the courses will roll out in sequence and task students with identifying a specific legal problem then outlining a technology solution to arrive at a solution.
The blog post cites an entrepreneurial fellow at Australian National University (ANU) College of Law, Scott Chamberlain who will develop and run the university’s blockchain units. He is already running a project at ANU called Lex Automagica, a tech stack automating legal processes that he thinks will create a capacity to solve an enormous number of social disputes without having to engage the middlemen and gatekeepers of the legal industry.
Chamberlain research is focused on the impact of technology on law, especially with Blockchain an increasing area of study. He believes that Blockchain technology has the potential to brings new innovation in law field. He said:
“Imagine an eBay-like platform that can resolve consumer law disputes without engaging the court system.”
According to Chamberlain, simple legal processes such as confirming the identities, relationship of the relevant parties, and rules of interaction between them could utilize blockchain technology to arrive at a resolution.
The blog post further reads:
“Blockchain can already perform these confirmations and automations through identity, tokenization, smart contracts, and dispute resolutions projects. Making it a short leap to apply these new technologies to the law.”
According to Scott Chamberlain, a decentralized practice of law is not intended to replace the lawyers and judges. He said:
“This is not about getting rid of lawyers or eliminating jobs. There will always be cases and situations that demand a higher level of expertise.”
Ripple is committed to working with university partners to ensure students with diverse backgrounds and experiences to inspire them to pursue careers in blockchain, distributed computing, FinTech and related fields. Ripple also provides funding to each university partner based on the scope of their blockchain-related activities. For this, Ripple has committed $50 million to UBRI.
As Crypto Economy reported, in July 2019, Ripple’s UBRI also partnered with University of Tokyo and Kyoto University in Japan.
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