MarcFriedenberg.com

This course will examine the legal rules surrounding the investigation of crime. We will explore basic constitutional constraints imposed on law enforcement by the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments?including constraints on search and seizure, interrogation, and identification procedures. We will also consider statutory rules, such as the rules governing use of wiretaps and other forms of electronic surveillance.

We will address a number of questions over the course of the semester. How do we accommodate our competing interests in both personal security and autonomy, and effective law enforcement? How do we regulate, or fail to regulate, police conduct? How could we more effectively minimize police misconduct? This course is designed to complement L6238, the Criminal Adjudication course. It may, however, be taken before, after, or without that course.

This course considers the legal issues created by the current explosive global technological change through which all developed societies are passing. We will consider issues of data privacy, secrecy, and encryption, copyright and intellectual property, mass media structure and freedom of speech, and the effect of changed communications media on administrative process and democratic politics. No specialized knowledge of computers is assumed; participants will gain some acquaintance with new technologies. Multiple short papers will be required.

The way in which the law responds to violations of rights is no less important than the way in which those rights are allocated. The law of remedies determines the law’s response to violations of rights, and in so doing, it delineates their boundaries and gives them legal meaning. Hence, the study of the law of remedies is closely related to the study of the substantive law, each field shedding light on the other.

This course focuses on remedies in Contracts and Torts, referring to the goals of the substantive law to better understand the remedial law. It explores the law of damages in both Contracts and Torts and covers topics such as: restitutionary damages; consequential damages; probabilistic recoveries; the relationship between damages and non-legal sanctions; and evidential damage. The course also covers the remedies of specific performance in Contracts and injunction in Torts and compares and contrasts these remedies with monetary ones. Some of the defenses available to both the breaching party and the wrongdoer, such as mitigation of damages and comparative fault, in Torts and Contracts will also be discussed.

A survey of the laws and principles governing the practice of lawyers and the organization of the legal profession. Topics include the the relationship between professional ethics and ordinary morality, the formation and termination of the lawyer-client relationship, confidentiality, disclosure, conflicts of interest, litigation tactics, the allocation of regulatory authority over the bar, the marketing of legal services, and law firm structure.

This course will examine both the theory and practice of patent law and, to a limited extent, the law of trade secrets. It will explore the structure of this form of intellectual property protection, the relationship between information disclosure and legal protection, and the interests of patentees, competitors, and investors. We will focus not only on the principal rules that make up patent law, but also on the policies underlying these rules.