Course: The Legal Landscape of the Sharing Economy

The Legal Landscape of the Sharing economy

In May-June 2015, Bronwen and Declan taught an intensive elective subject at UNSW Law to seven bright undergraduate and postgraduate students entitled 'The Legal Landscape of the Sharing Economy' which covered topics related to the research projects; that is, organisational structure, harm and its prevention, and the relationship between gift and contract. A copy of the syllabus is available here.

The students carried out group-based research as part of their assessment and made presentations in the final class, two of which are available below:

1. Seed Libraries

2. Crowd-sourced Equity Funding

Professor Bronwen Morgan's 'Between Social Activism and Social Enterprise' project at University of New South Wales Law School. We research topics of sharing economy ownership and control, legal and organisational form of sustainability focused enterprises, risk, harm and insurance to social enterprises and other issues with sharing at a smaller scale to AirBnB, Uber, Lyft and other large-scale sharing initiatives that have an extractive/rental focus. By contrast we have examined transport, car-sharing, co-working and food producers and food distributors, as well as community energy, decentralised energy and 'civic energy' initiatives using cooperative structures, Community Interest Company forms, and Benefit Corporation laws to better deliver their social outcomes.