The phenomenon of digitalization law and its impact on legal education

The article explores the interrelation between law and digitalization, illustrated by such phenomena as e-justice, e-governance, state registries, electronic signatures, artificial intelligence and law, blockchain technologies, and tokenization. The author provides specialized legal acts in the field of digitalization and raises the issue of whether digitalization law can be distinguished as a separate interdisciplinary and comprehensive branch of law. For a more in-depth analysis, the author differentiates between related concepts such as “digitization,” “digitalization,” and “digital transformation.” Based on the conducted research, it is substantiated that effective regulation of digitalization primarily involves identifying key “intersection points” of law and digitalization, which define the spheres of legal influence on digital processes. Identifying such intersection points facilitates the recognition of risks associated with the use of digital technologies to prevent them. Within this analysis, precedents are considered that demonstrate human rights violations resulting from the functioning of artificial intelligence, and the results of the first international report on artificial intelligence security are presented. Special attention is given to legal education, its adaptation to the challenges of digital transformation, and the necessity of developing digital competencies in future lawyers. The study examines Germany’s experience in integrating digitalization into legal education, including the operation of scientific institutes of digital law within law faculties, interdisciplinary educational programs offered to law students, and German scholars’ arguments in favor of establishing digitalization law as a distinct legal field. The article also presents the results of an anonymous survey of 51 law students, which helped determine the level of use of large language models in the educational process, students’ awareness of the risks of their application, and attitudes toward the integration of relevant technologies into legal education.