Harlan Curriculum

Harlan Scholars at the Institute form an intellectual family of faculty and students who work together to study information, communication and the law. Harlan Scholars and faculty meet regularly throughout the year to develop programs, plan events and share in the exploration of intellectual issues of common interest.

In consultation with a faculty mentor, honors students who choose to affiliate with the Institute take a common set of core courses plus electives tailored to their professional and scholarly goals. The curriculum affords students maximum flexibility to develop substantive competence and discrete skill sets in the areas of their chosen academic concentration.

Honor students in the Law School’s Harlan Scholars Program affiliated with the Institute are required to produce, and defend before their peers, a project that takes on novel issues of analysis or design. Topics are developed in collaboration with the faculty—with an emphasis on one-on-one consultation between student and faculty as the project develops. During the third year “capstone” phase of the program, Institute students critique each other’s work, develop strategies to publish their results to a broad audience, and learn about new technologies that can change law practice and social, economic, and civic organizations.

Harlan Curriculum
 

Core Courses (Required)

Core Courses (Recommended)


Electives (two (2) or more of the following)

Institute for Information Law Capstone and Tech Lab

Time: Tuesdays, from 4 - 5:40pm

Location: Institute, 40 Worth Street, Room 706

In the Tech Law Lab, students and faculty work together in teams on “real world” technology or intellectual property law projects that bring about positive change in the world. While the project may center on tech or IP, it may also use tech and IP to promote the goals of social justice, human rights, and democracy. In this class we work in teams to learn skills of collaboration and project management. The class meets weekly.

Please familiarize yourself with this year’s projects. During the first class we will divide up into teams and begin work.
  • Human Rights and Health Information - Prof. Molly Beutz (cross-listed with JAC and IILP)

 Limit:  3 IILP Students

The right to health is clearly recognized under international law, and there are strong arguments for recognizing a right to access health information as an essential component of that right. Tens of thousands of individuals die every day from easily preventable diseases; according to the Health Information for All by 2015 Campaign (HIFA2015), a significant factor in many of those deaths is that the care giver or health worker does not have information necessary to know what to do and when to seek additional assistance. Despite its importance, however, access to health information has received very little attention as a human rights issue.
Students participating in this capstone project would work with Professor Beutz and HIFA2015 to research and draft a briefing paper that evaluates the right to health information under international law and describes what such a right would entail – what obligations it would impose on states – in practical terms. For example, the right to health information would include both an obligation to provide health information to individuals and an obligation to train health care providers to meet the specific health needs of individuals. Students would communicate with the HIFA2015 membership – a global network of health care providers and advocates – to develop guidance regarding how states should implement their obligation to ensure the right to health information, including examples of good practices. In consultation with HIFA2015 members, students will also research and provide recommendations regarding an advocacy strategy for using the team’s research, such as submitting it to an international institution, disseminating it to key national and international decision-makers, or publishing it in a journal. If time permits, students may also be involved in implementing recommended strategies.
  • Interviews with Handbags and Stripsteaks - Prof. Dan Hunter

Limit: 5 Students

This project is about the social significance of intellectual property.
I'm interested in studies of the way that people use and think about IP in different areas of life. These studies are likely to be ethnographic in orientation (don't worry if you're not formally trained in anthropology) and involve interviewing people in design-and-IP professions and related areas--and talking to people in the street--about the way that IP affects them, their consumption, their lives. I'm really interested in stories that demonstrate "unusual" features of IP, i.e. aspects of IP that are not the standard legal account of the protection of IP.
One topic I'm interested in is the way that branding operates with the trademark system. One of the most obvious examples of this is the rise of counterfeits in the fashion industry. So I've been doing an "Interviews with Handbags" Project where I talk to women about the designer handbags that they happen to be wearing, to find out whether they're real, what is their view of counterfeits, whether they fooled by other people wearing fake handbags, etc etc. There are some specifically legal questions that this project will answer (most notably in the area of consumer confusion and the concept of post-sale confusion) but mostly I'm just intrigued by the way that luxury handbags have become such a staple of modern life, and the role that both counterfeit bags and trademarks play in this.
Another example is recipes. Eric von Hippel has written about the way that high end restaurants "protect" their recipes, but I'm interested in more prosaic questions about recipes like where do traditional recipes come from, is there any sense of ownership that a family has in the recipe, under what condition are recipes passed on (from mother to daughter? to step-daughters? to sons?). This sort of study is about the way that possession and ownership of things that might be IP are governed by norms outside the IP system. I'd also like to see whether there are specific areas where recipes attract special attention: I'm thinking of the rise of "molecular gastronomy" restaurants like WD-50 on Clinton St. There are lots of other examples.  We can work them out as we meet.  I'm interested in areas that you might think worth exploring.  The defining characteristic of this project will not be the area, but the fact that you will actually have to go and talk with people about how IP works in their lives.
  • The Networked Governance Project - Prof. Beth Noveck and Prof. David Johnson

Team A (Noveck) - Policy Wiki - limited to 5 students

Team B (Johnson) - Civic Jury - limited to 5 students

This capstone will study the impact of technology on government institutions. We will focus on how to use law, policy, and technology to engage experts and the broader public in decision-making. Working in multi-disciplinary teams, we will develop concrete and implementation-ready pilot projects for the next presidential administration. These projects may include developing a detailed implementation plan for the creation of a new national Chief Technology Officer, developing a "policy wiki" for use by the EPA in connection with Clean Air Act Air air quality criteria, and designing a "civic jury" to provide oversight over a government official. Our aim is to develop the process and the design of the website to implement that process and to describe both in enough detail that they can be undertaken in the first one hundred days of the next administration. Because of the political relevance of this capstone, work will be front-loaded in the first semester. Because of the unique opportunity to influence policy for the 44th President, this seminar will require more work (and more reward) than the 1 credit.

  • Open Access Law - Prof. James Grimmelmann

Limit: 5 Students

In an age of computers and the Internet, it's unconscionable that many of the basic documents that constitute "the law" aren't available online, for free, without restrictions. Lexis and Westlaw have made fortunes making the law somewhat accessible; in this project, we'll work on making the law truly accessible. The group will produce a white paper for the next Presidential administration explaining the problem and making recommendations for how it can best open up the law more broadly for all citizens. Free publishing? Standardized file formats and protocols? Enhancements to the Freedom of Information Act? Copyright reform? The group will analyze the possibilities and choose among them, with the goal of finding specific legal changes to improve the situation across all branches of government, state and federal.