This course is open to both law and non-law students, and to students on both the Ithaca and Cornell Tech campuses. Law students should enroll online, and non-law students should contact me to enroll.
This is a research seminar on the law of computer software. Specific topics will vary from year to year, but will typically include intellectual property protections for software, constitutional rights to create and run software, embedding legal rules in digital systems, and the regulation of complex artificial intelligence and machine learning systems. The readings will primarily consist of classic and cutting-edge legal scholarship, supplemented with materials on technical background and legal research. Over the course of the semester, participants will research and write a publishable piece of scholarship.
Credits: 3
Meetings: 60 minutes, twice per week, for 13 weeks
Grading: Student option
Satisfies the Writing Requirement: Yes
Students who complete this course will be able to:
This course is intended for students who are interested in technology law and want to improve their skills in working with legal scholarship. There are no formal prerequisites, but you should have some familiarity with software, and some familiarity with technology law.
Any of the following is sufficient background in software:
Any of the following is sufficient background in law:
If you’re uncertain whether you have the necessary background, please reach out to me. Everyone’s situation is different.
This course is open to students in all graduate degree programs. Undergraduates will be admitted only in exceptional circumstances.
Please see the course policies document for information about meeting with me; inclusion; names, titles and pronouns; the history of the site where the course takes place; academic integrity and collaboration; accessibility and accommodations for disabilities; class recordings; professionalism; and health concerns.
All required readings will be linked from this syllabus, available online through the through the Cornell library, or posted to Canvas.
I recommend that you have and consult a legal citation manual. The nominal standard is The Bluebook, published by a consortium of four law reviews. For law students who intend to practice in the United States, the roughly $50 price tag is a reasonable investment. But for others, you can get by perfectly well with The Indigo Book, a free online reimplementation of the Bluebook’s rules. Introduction to Basic Legal Citation, by Cornell Law’s own beloved former dean Peter Martin, is a highly readable introduction to legal citation that is linked point-by-point to the Indigo Book’s rules.
Although it is not required, due primarily to the unreasonably high price, I also recommend Eugene Volokh, Academic Legal Writing, a writing manual specifically targeted at law-review substance and style.
Most of our sessions will be devoted to careful discussion of a substantive topic (e.g., whether software as such is patentable). The readings for those session will consist of one or more scholarly articles, occasionally supplemented with additional materials for context. These will be interspersed with occasional sessions devoted to the research and writing process (e.g., how to read law-review articles efficiently), which will shift into presentations and discussion of your research as the semester progresses.
I have posted notes and questions for each assignment. These are not afterthoughts. They describe how I plan to attack each article in class discussion. In particular, many of the outlines start with a technical “what is” question, such as “what is encryption?” and we will spend significant class time nailing down these technical concepts. Even if you already know how a technology works, you may be surprised at how much work it takes to make that intuitive understanding precise. We will also pay attention to the descriptions the papers we read use, especially the metaphors they develop. I want you to become as good as the best at explaining technologies.
Each assignment also comes with a list of “Additional Resources.” These are not required readings. They are not even recommended optional readings. Instead, you should think of them as starting points if you want to dig deeper on a given class’s topic. Many of them are good enough that I could have built the class around them instead, and all of them are important references if you want to be an expert on the topic.
The course will meet in a hybrid format. We will meet in person in room 165 at the Bloomberg Center and by Zoom. If you are in the Cornell Tech section, you should join in person unless you are unwell or traveling or have another good reason to join remotely and have confirmed with me in advance.
Attendance in class is required. Especially in view of the other significant demands on your time, I will be understanding about conflicts and flexible in working with you to make alternative arrangements as needed. That said, consistent unexcused absences are not okay, and may lead to a reduced grade or exclusion from the course (after reasonable written warning). Please arrive promptly. I promise that we will end on time, but that means we must start on time. Bring the readings with you, either on your computer or in hard copy.
Your work for this class will consist of the following:
First, do the assigned readings and participate in class discussions. I expect all of you to be regular and active participants in the discussions, and to support your classmates in doing so. I understand that everyone has an off day now and then, but this class can only succeed if all of us are fully engaged.
Second, you will write a research paper of at least 10,000 words on a topic of your choosing. I will approve paper proposals on a wide variety of research subjects; the only substantive requirement is that the paper must discuss an issue in which the legal treatment of software depends on the technical details of how that software works.
The most important goal of the paper is to give you practice in writing clearly and precisely about computer technology. Technical readers should find your descriptions are accurate; non-technical readers should find them enlightening. After that, I want you to have something interesting and important to say about technology law, and to be able to explain it persuasively in a way that others find useful.
The paper may conform to the stylistic and scholarly conventions of any relevant academic discipline. For example, law students may write papers in the form of a law-review note, computer-science students may write papers in the form of an ACM conference paper, and so on. You should choose the discipline and form that will be most professionally useful to you. You are not required to submit your papers for publication, but it is my goal for the course that each of you will complete a paper you are proud enough of to want to publish.
Your deliverables for the paper will be due on the following schedule:
The purpose of these deliverables is to help you keep a large project on track, and to give you useful suggestions at a time when you are still able to make appropriate changes in response. I will meet with you following each deliverable to discuss your progress and plans. I am also always available to meet to provide feedback and suggestions, even on short notice, and I am happy to answer questions by email.
Third, you will give a presentation to the class on your paper. Presentations will be scheduled for the final weeks of the course, after your rough drafts but before your final draft is due. Each presentation will be scheduled for 30 minutes. You should plan to present for 10 minutes; slides are not required but are highly recommended. Then you should be ready to take questions on your paper for the remaining 20 minutes. (I hope that the skills involved will be equally useful for giving an academic paper at a conference and for giving an oral argument in court.)
Your grades will be determined as follows:
You are allowed but not required to use generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude in doing research for your paper. You are strictly prohibited from using generative AI in writing your paper. More specifically:
I have chosen these policies because the goal of the course is for you to get better at research and writing through careful practice. On the research side, I believe that you can substantially improve your research skills through using AI, doing research on your own, or a mixture of the two. I am willing to let you decide how best to strike that balance on your own, and trusting you to be thoughtful whatever you do.
Writing is different. Here, there is no substitute for doing the work yourself. Generative AI may make this particular piece of writing easier, but at the cost of making all your future writing worse. Of course, I want you to write eloquently phrased and tightly argued papers. But I would much rather have you give me something rough that helped you improve your writing, than give me something polished from which you learned nothing. Graduate school is meant to be a safe space, one where you can take risks, make mistakes and learn from them.
I also regard a strictly enforced no-AI-writing policy as a matter of equity. The fear that your classmates might secretly be using AI can be a source of anxiety and fear, and and make you feel pressured to use it yourself to keep up. I’m doing this to reassure you that no, they’re not using AI for their writing, so you don’t need to worry about using it either.
If AI really is here to stay, you will have plenty of other occasions on which to use and master it. This course is not one of them; we’re doing something different here.
We will usually meet Mondays and Wednesdays 1:00 to 2:00. Our first session will be on August 24, and our final session will be December 7. Please note that we follow the Cornell Tech calendar, not the law school calendar. That means we will meet on:
We will not meet on:
The following is a rough schedule of topics and readings. I will fill in a few details as we go.
Introduction
Copyright
Speech
Internet Architecture
Legal Formalization
Software Engineering
Privacy
Additional Topics
Presentations