These courses, seminars, and workshops are not just for students considering a high-technology practice -- on the contrary, they should be of interest to anyone who wants to understand the effect of technological change on the law and on society at large. The introductory Internet Law course assumes no prior knowledge of computers or the Internet other than an ability to send and receive e-mail and operate a browser well enough to read this page. Seminars -- in which enrollment is limited to 16 or fewer students each of whom writes a research paper -- are more advanced and often require that you have taken a related course as a pre-requisite.
Many other courses in the curriculum provide an essential introduction to topics relevant to computer and Internet law, including alternate dispute resolution, banking, conflict of laws, trademarks, patents, and commercial law.
International Copyright. Prof. Haun. An introduction to international copyright and cultural property issues, treaties, policies and theories. With the advent of the global Information Infrastructure ("GII") and electronic commerce, lawyers need a working knowledge of how copyright product produced in the U.S. can be protected in a global economy. Because almost all U.S. corporations, large or small, are now establishing internet web sites or actually transacting business over the internet, they are all virtual global businesses. Vice President Gore in A Framework for Global Electronic Commerce (1997), predicted that GII commerce, including commerce in copyrighted products, will produce internet commerce of tens of billions of dollars by the turn of the century. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the World Intellectual Property Organization and others are presently engaged in establishing refinements to existing worldwide copyright treaties and practices, in part to further define and clarify existing rights under existing treaties, and to promote effective protection for copyrights in the digital world. Students learn basic global copyright theory and learn how to negotiate the major copyright treaties and agreements including WIPO (1996), Berne, GATT/TRIPS, NAFTA, UCC, Rome, and cultural property agreements and proposals.
Internet Law. Prof. Froomkin. A survey of the diverse legal problems that arise from the global computer communication network known as the Internet. To the greatest extent possible, choice of topics will be driven by current events. It is likely that topics covered will include: jurisdiction, anonymity and libel, privacy issues, censorship and pornography, cryptography and export control, and the commercial and legal impacts of new technologies such as e-cash a digital signatures. Internet Law is a useful preparation for several related seminars.
Legal Research Techniques. Advanced research concepts and methods as they apply to federal and state legislative history, administrative research, litigation tools, loose-leaf services, and other secondary source materials. Tradiitonal print resources are compared with LEXIS, WESTLAW, and Internet resources.
Computer Analysis of Legal Texts Workshop. Prof. Gudridge Do computers provide a means for analyzing legal texts that are different in kind from the modes of reading lawyers ordinarily bring to bear? Some legal documents are now, for many purposes, unreadable. Only a few persons claim to have read and remembered the entirety of the Internal Revenue Code, congressional Statutes at Large for 1981, or the Code of Federal Regulations as such. Instead, for the most part, we divide large legal texts into parts, and read what we can, and assume we have missed nothing important. Are we right? What would we know if we read all of 33 F.3d from front to back? We can program computers to do this reading. Do we want to?
This seminar is a series of experiments. It begins by looking closely at the computerized reading law students already program - Westlaw and Lexis searches. What are the jurisprudential assumptions that shape the techniques used in these searches? Students will undertake searches, analyze their strategies, and compare their approaches with the methods they would employ if they used only traditional library materials. Following this introductory exercise, the seminar surveys forms of computerized content analysis already in use in nonlegal fields of work (e.g., classical studies, computational linguistics). Finally, the seminar takes up selected legal corpora (perhaps, for example, the succeeding texts of the constitution of the State of Florida). Students will use available computer programs to map these corpora (for example, construct concordances) in order to try to identify features of the documents which are otherwise not apparent but which are indeed of relevance to lawyers - to open up, in other words, new legal readings.
Intellectual Property in the Digital Era. Prof. Froomkin. The growth of easily-copied digitized data -- words, pictures, and other media -- creates a number of problems for existing intellectual property regimes, as does the growth of the Internet. Participants in this seminar will jointly explore contemporary Intellectual Property problems relating to networks and digitized information such as, and probably including:
Banking. Prof. Langbein.
Broadcast Regulation. Prof. Levi
Commercial Law II. Prof. Hausler.
Conflict of Laws. Profs .Hausler / Oxman
Consumer Law. Prof. Schiff.
Defamation and Privacy. Prof. Levi
International Conflict of Laws
International Sales
Patent Law. Prof Gaubatz
Trademark and Trade Secret Workshop. Prof. Morgan.
Revised Feb 3, 1999