Law schools compete for students by touting the strength of their curriculum, and with every school claiming that it is strong in a particular area, it’s sometimes hard to get a handle on whether a particular school really would be better than another for a student interested in, for example, corporate law or environmental law. [...]

[Read more →]

Legal writing programs get staffed in 3 meaningfully different ways. One model relies primarily on part-time instructors (generally adjunct teachers or graduate student fellows) supervised by a director of the program who is sometimes, but not always, a full-time specialist in legal writing. A second model uses a director (sometimes, but not always, [...]

[Read more →]

Let me use this post to suggest one way in which prospective students can begin comparing academic programs. All law schools require their first year students to take a heavily prescribed curriculum. Few, if any electives exist, and indeed the required courses are practically the same at most schools. By contrast, second [...]

[Read more →]

D is for Digital is over now. I urge anyone interested in the Google Book Deal (aka the Google Book Search) to check out the schedule page and the webcast links (the stream links are at the top of the Friday and Saturday schedules respectively). James Grimmelmann put together a conference that aired out pro [...]

[Read more →]

From Wired.com:

When 22-year-old programmer Aaron Swartz decided last fall to help an open government activist amass a public and free copy of millions of federal court records, he didn’t not expect he’d end up with an FBI agent trying to stake out his house.
But that’s what happened, as Swartz found out this week when got [...]

[Read more →]

s expected, last weekend’s NYT op-eds with advice to college students attracted commentary that points out how legal education is like, and unlike, college education.  Paul Horwitz at Prawfsblawg offers characteristically thoughtful analysis; Danielle Citron at Concurring Opinions is pithier but no less on point.
When I read that series of op-eds, I was struck not [...]

[Read more →]

(Lots of interesting details are omitted from the anecdote below; in time, as circumstances permit, I may flesh them out!)
Ah, the perils of teaching timely topics.  Among the scenarios that I ran by my Trademark Law students at the beginning of this semester is a pending Intent to Use application to register a trademark.  The [...]

[Read more →]

Wired editor Chris Anderson, in a book entitled Free, in passages defining “free lunch” and the “TANSTAAFL” acronym, decides to get his authorial words for free from Wikipedia and to include them in Free without attribution. Guess what? Turns out that when it comes to lifting other people’s writing, there’s no such thing [...]

[Read more →]

From Business Week:
This summer, the government agency is expected to issue new advertising guidelines that will require bloggers to disclose when they’re writing about a sponsor’s product and voicing opinions that aren’t their own. The new FTC guidelines say that blog authors should disclose when they’re being compensated by an advertiser to discuss a product.
And [...]

[Read more →]

[Read more →]

[Cross-posted from Concurring Opinions]
My post on the challenges facing the law school Research Dean contained an implicit and unexamined assumption regarding a gap between the interest of the individual faculty member in producing and distributing research and scholarship, on the one hand, and the interest of that faculty member’s law school in the research and [...]

[Read more →]

Time Magazine’s “World’s Most Influential Person” poll got hacked. Detailed account of same here.
No Tags

[Read more →]

The machine prints and binds books on demand in five minutes, while customers wait. From The Guardian:
It’s not elegant and it’s not sexy – it looks like a large photocopier – but the Espresso Book Machine is being billed as the biggest change for the literary world since Gutenberg invented the printing press more than [...]

[Read more →]

So when I first encountered the WDL, I was excited. I did, however, have a lingering question about the intellectual property laws involved. I scanned the page and found the infamous Legal link at the bottom of the page. I clicked. And then the moment of “O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” vanished. Newman!
Although the [...]

[Read more →]

[Read more →]

I’ll be talking next Friday at a conference at Columbia on the effects of User-Generated Content.  Here’s the overview:
The rapid increase of user-generated content on the Internet is a source of concern for traditional media firms. Will the YouTubes, Facebooks, Flickrs, Second Lifes and the HuffPos take away significant audience segments on a sustaining basis? [...]

[Read more →]

From the publisher’s website:
Metaphors, moral panics, folk devils, Jack Valenti, Joseph Schumpeter, John Maynard Kenyes, predictable irrationality, and free market fundamentalism are a few of the topics covered in this lively, unflinching examination of the Copyright Wars: the pitched battles over new technology, business models, and most of all, consumers. In Moral Panics and the [...]

[Read more →]

That’s the title of this NYT article, which reports in part:
These days, however, community need reaches far beyond reference help — and in many libraries, it is turning a normally tranquil place into an emotional and stressful hotbed.
As the national economic crisis has deepened and social services have become casualties of budget cuts, libraries have [...]

[Read more →]

So the Rescuecom.com case was just decided.  I will have to parse it carefully, but my initial impression is that it brings the Second Circuit into harmony with the other federal circuits.  As I argued in my Google’s Law article, I think this is the right result on the doctrinal issue of trademark use (I [...]

[Read more →]

Six murders were linked by DNA that probably had nothing to do with the killer(s).
From the BBC:
Police in Germany have admitted that a woman they have been hunting for more than 15 years may never have existed. Dubbed the “phantom of Heilbronn”, the woman was described by police as the country’s most dangerous woman. Investigators [...]

[Read more →]