Current classes available with CIS faculty, staff, and affiliates
Spring 2013
Privacy and Technology in Law and Practice
Instructors: Jennifer Granick / Aleecia McDonald
In this lecture course, students will identify instances in which new technologies have changed the likelihood that information about individuals will be created, collected, stored, analyzed, and disclosed to both private entities and to governments. We will look at the internet, mobile platforms and drones, among other developments. The class will identify both privacy defeating and privacy enhancing technologies, and consider how legal regimes and policy choices as well as technological design can mitigate or highten the risk of unwanted information disclosure. Assignments will ask for both descriptive and normative analysis. Students will examine the interrelationship between privacy, security, free speech, innovation and other public goods and be asked to debate particular policy outcomes in light of competing values about information privacy with regard to both the public and private sector. We will cover issues such as Do-Not-Track and online advertising, data security breaches, consumer notice, privacy by design, corporate best practices, Federal Trade Commission enforcement, workplace monitoring, and law enforcement and national security access.
Winter 2013
Antitrust
Instructor: Barbara van Schewick
This course will explore the basic concepts in antitrust and competition. We will examine cartels, monopolization, vertical restraints and mergers. The course is open to GSB students and graduate students in the Economics Department.
Past Classes
Autumn 2012
Intellectual Property Advanced Topics: The Future of Online Music and Online Video
Instructors: Barbara van Schewick and Paul Goldstein
The online music and online video industries are undergoing profound changes. In online video, the rise of Netflix and Hulu are just two examples of this trend. This class will explore how the different technical, economic or regulatory decisions we make today will interact to shape the future of these industries, and what the different options under consideration will mean for specific companies in this space. Class sessions will consist of a mix of guest lectures by industry leaders and class discussions of the assigned readings. Throughout the class, the students will work in interdisciplinary groups on problems facing specific companies in the online and online video industry today. For the final project, the groups will address specific policy problems from the perspective of a specific company, with different groups representing companies on different sides of an issue. The class is open to law students and students from other parts of the university.
Legal Aspects of Autonomous Driving
Instructor: Bryant Walker Smith
Self-driving cars and trucks are rapidly entering the mainstream. They raise key legal and policy questions, which this seminar explores through source materials (from case law to treaties), academic scholarship, and industry speakers. Topics include state and federal regulation, public and private standards, liability and insurance, privacy and security, and social norms. Because the course is intended to meaningfully advance -- rather than to merely present -- legal analysis of this emerging technology, participants will be expected to actively contribute during class and to critically reflect through either regular essays for W credit or a final research paper for R credit.
Cyberlaw/Fair Use Clinic: Advanced
Instructor: Anthony Falzone
In this hands-on, project-oriented seminar, students will work on a wide range of cyberlaw projects with lawyers from the Center for Internet and Society's Fair Use Project and with lawyers from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. There will be significant faculty-student interactions through meetings to discuss the projects and an associated bi-monthly discussion seminar covering advanced cyberlaw topics.
This clinic provides law students with the opportunity to represent clients in cutting-edge issues of intellectual property and technology law, in the public interest. Through the hands-on experience of representing clients (under the supervision of the faculty) in various fora, students will learn professional responsibility and advocacy skills, substantive law and procedural rules related to their projects, and will examine the concept of the public interest in intellectual property and technology law. Clients will likely vary widely, and may be individual artists; technologists; non-profit institutions; coalitions; etc. In the past, students have drafted amicus briefs, counseled nonprofits on public-interest initiatives, created a patent licensing scheme, represented independent and documentary filmmakers who are pursuing legislation in Congress, and counseled artists developing new technology-based art forms, among other projects. Thus, the skills each student learns will also vary according to project. In the classroom component, we will explore public interest practice in tech law in various fora, and spend significant time on student projects.
You are expected to commit approximately 20 hours per week (variable) to clinic work.
Elements used in Grading: Compliance with office procedures, dependability, relationship with clients and students, instructor and supervisor, productivity, responsibility, class participation, quality of work, development of lawyering skills, improvement shown.
Spring 2012
Intellectual Property Advanced Topics:The Future of Online Music and Online Video
Instructors: Barbara van Schewick and Paul Goldstein
The online music and online video industries are undergoing profound changes. In online video, the rise of Netflix and Hulu are just two examples of this trend. This class will explore how the different technical, economic or regulatory decisions we make today will interact to shape the future of these industries, and what the different options under consideration will mean for specific companies in this space. Class sessions will consist of a mix of guest lectures by industry leaders and class discussions of the assigned readings.
Throughout the class, the students will work in interdisciplinary groups on problems facing specific companies in the online and online video industry today. For the final project, the groups will address specific policy problems from the perspective of a specific company, with different groups representing companies on different sides of an issue.
The class is open to law students and students from other parts of the university.
Privacy and Technology
Instructor: Ryan Calo
This seminar explores U.S. privacy law through the lens of American experiences with, and perceptions of, technology. Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis open their seminal article The Right to Privacy with a vivid description of technologic change. The reader learns that "recent inventions" such as "instantaneous photographs … have invaded the sacred precincts of private and domestic life" and how "numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that 'what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the house-tops.'" The examples change, but countless law review articles, court opinions, floor debates, and legislative preambles also begin by describing a technological shift thought to necessitate a change in regulation or interpretation. The evolution of American privacy law seems inexorably bound up in a story about technology.
What role does our perception of technology play in establishing or reforming statutory, common, and constitutional privacy law? Can the way we conceptualize technology shed light on the disconnect between how people talk about privacy and behave in practice? Can it help explain the lag many perceive between the evolution of privacy law and the pace of technologic change? Through a series of readings that include case law, statutes, and academic scholarship, seminar participants will gain a working understanding of American privacy law by examining its intersection with our individual and collect experiences of technology.
Autumn 2011
Freedom of Speech in a Digitally Interconnected World
Instructor: Andrew McLaughlin
This course will examine differing national approaches to the regulation of speech and expression, aiming at a deeper understanding of the First Amendment and its values in today's context of global interconnectedness. Americans tend to underappreciate the extent to which the First Amendment, as interpreted by our federal courts, is exceptional, both in the scope of its protections and the peculiarity of its limitations and exceptions. We also tend to equate our expansive First Amendment with democracy, and censorship with dictatorship, whereas in practice nearly all other countries, including many vibrant democracies, have implemented regimes for speech regulation that are notably more restrictive than ours. To understand why, students in this course will engage in a critical, comparative examination of the major legal, cultural, religious, and political rationales put forth for limiting individual expression, and then examine how those rationales play out in real-world legal and extra-legal state systems and tactics.
Our work will be broken into three parts. We'll start with a systematic look at the leading theories and justifications asserted to support state restrictions on citizen speech and press activities. We'll then delve into country case studies, including India, Germany, Thailand, Turkey, Australia, Iran, Russia, South Korea, France, and the UK. Finally, we'll assess the ability of conflicting national systems to coexist in the age of the Internet, which is both increasingly significant as a medium of individual and organized expression, and proving to be disruptive of traditional legal and non-legal state techniques for enforcing limitations.
Special Instructions: This course is open to law students and graduate students from other parts of the university. Students will have the option to write either a significant research paper or a series of weekly writing assignments. After the term begins, students accepted into the course can transfer from section (01) into section (02), which meets the R requirement, with consent of the instructor.