Academic

Introductions

By Gordon Smith, Christine, Hurt, Vic Fleischer, Fred Tung, Lisa Fairfax, David Zaring

Thanks to Gordon for the invitation to guestblog this week. Actually, I am not sure if he offered or I volunteered earlier on this year, but in any case here I am, quite ready and excited to share my thoughts with the world (or our small part of it).

I plan to post on the specific topic of integrating intellectual property issues in a transactional law school curriculum.

Everyone has some sense of what intellectual property is about (the set of rules and institutions designed to promote innovation and creativity in society), but the term transactional law may be less clear. The term covers, at the least, traditional business law courses such as Business Enterprise (or Bus Orgs or Business Associations, or some similar term), Securities, Mergers & Acquisitions, and related doctrinal areas. More broadly, the transactional law curriculum would also include skills-focused courses such as negotiation, contract drafting, and deal-making. So described, what I am calling the transactional law curriculum includes clinical and doctrinal courses that are geared towards developing transactional skill sets, both through learning the details of transactional practice and through understanding legal relationships as transactional (as opposed to adversarial).

Over the next few days I will be making the case for the importance of intellectual property in a transactional law curriculum and for thinking of intellectual property in transactional terms. I will make these points through the following series of posts: (1) the transactional turn in intellectual property, (2) the intersection of intellectual property and transactional law, (3) what a transactional intellectual property law course would look like and (4) the policy and conceptual implications of the transactional turn.

The next few blogs can be viewed as a preview of a presentation by me and my two co-authors (Richard Gruner and Jay Kesan) at the 2009 AALS Midyear Business Association to be held next June. (Of course, all ideas here are my own and do not represent the opinions of my co-authors.)

Full post as published by Conglomerate on October 27, 2008 (boomark / email).