OVERVIEW | SYLLABUS | REQUIREMENTS | BIBLIOGRAPHY | WEB RESOURCESREQUIREMENTS FOR LAW 276: CYBERLAW
Professor Pamela Samuelson, University of California, Berkeley
This course will not so much be unusual because it deals with cutting edge issues of the law, for a great many of your courses are of this sort. Rather, it will be unusual because it will require you to be resourceful and active in ways that are not common in law school. It will, for example, require you to search for judicial opinions and other legal materials on the World Wide Web and to participate in electronic discussions conducted via a course listserv. It will also encourage you to develop some electronic information skills you may not have had before, such as learning to create infobases in Folio Views to hold legal research obtained from Lexis-Nexis. While course requirements can be satisfied with conventional written products, those of you who want to be more adventurous in composing work to demonstrate your mastery of cyberlaw issues are welcome to do so as long as you check with me first. A more adventurous project might be developing a website or infobase on a specialized topic.
Your grade for this course will be based on your participation in class generally (15 per cent), your participation in the class you will be planning and helping to carry out (20 per cent), and your written work for the course (which will consist either of a conventional supervised writing paper or of two other papers or projects).
Participation in the class as a whole will include not only your oral remarks in the physical classroom, but also your participation in listserv discussions we will be having during the course of the semester. It is also part of your job in preparing for class to "surf" the World Wide Web in search of information of relevance to class. The extent to which you are prepared for class and have retrieved material pertinent to the class from the World Wide Web will be given weight, as will your willingness to share information on cyberlaw topics that you come across. Sharing your expertise with one another is also important.
After our first introductory class on cyberlaw, we will spend four weeks discussing cyberlaw issues in which I have been deeply immersed. What we do the remainder of the term is largely up to you. In filling out the survey I'll be handing out, you'll have a chance to express your preference about which of the many other cyberlaw issues you want us to focus on. Please also use this survey as a way to express your preference about the cyberlaw issue (or cluster of issues) in which you are interested enough to be on the planning team for that class. After looking at the surveys, I'll make a judgment about which issues seemed to attract the greatest interest. In the best of all possible worlds, the expressions of interest will be sufficiently diverse that you will naturally sort yourselves into the appropriate teams of preparers. If not, I will endeavor to place you on a team most proximate to your interests. If you would prefer to be involved in the planning of our of the courses in the first several
Each team of students who will be working together to plan a class will be expected to do research on the topic or cluster of topics, to decide which resources to assign for class reading, to lead some listserv discussion about it, and to lead classroom discussion on the topic. Insofar as you can do so, please use Web-based resources in making assignments. Assigning visits to certain websites is fine. For some topics, some educational materials about the technology underlying the issue may be appropriate. If you can find web resources for this, that's good, but if not, please be prepared to provide this by other means (e.g., through a short lecture at the beginning of the class or by sending email to your colleagues in advance of class). Each team is responsible for getting assigned material to me and to your fellow students by the class just preceding the class you will be teaching.
As for writing projects, you have two choices. One is to write a conventional supervised analytic paper on a mutually acceptable topic that meets the law school's requirements. If you choose to do this, you must let me know the topic on which you plan to write in the first two weeks of the term. By the fifth week of the term, you must provide me with a one-page statement of the thesis for your paper. Your first draft will be due on March 21 and the second draft will be due on May 9. You are on notice now of the deadlines for such a paper. Extensions of the deadlines will not lightly be granted.
The other alternative is to compose two short works on cyberlaw issues. Insofar as you choose to submit conventional written work to satisfy this requirement (and this is quite acceptable), you are to submit no more than 10 typed pages of double-spaced material for each. One of the two written products you submit may be of an unconventional sort (e.g., an infobase or a website), but please check with me first before doing an unconventional product. The first of these products will be due on March 14; the second on May 7. The default assignments for these two works is, first, writing a memorandum about legislation that might be needed to satisfy U.S. obligations under Article 11 of the WIPO Copyright Treaty, including model language of which you approve, and second, writing a dissenting opinion in Reno v. ACLU. Should you wish to write about something else, please communicate with me about it and I will try to accommodate your interests. But plan to write about something other than the topic for whic
OVERVIEW | SYLLABUS | REQUIREMENTS | BIBLIOGRAPHY | WEB RESOURCES