Teaching Non-Lawyers

From Berkman Alum William McGeveran...

In the last few days I’ve been at two gigs involving teaching about law to non-lawyers. It is an eye-opening and highly recommended experience.

Last week I was on the faculty of the annual Summer Doctoral Programme sponsored by the Oxford Internet Institute and this year hosted in the U.S. by the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School. (That’s “Programme” as they spell it and “Center” as we spell it.) SDP is an intensive two-week seminar for doctoral candidates from all over the world studying the internet through a range of methodological approaches and disciplinary perspectives. Almost none are lawyers. This week I taught cyberlaw topics at the annual Institute for Computer Policy and Law, cosponsored by Cornell University and EDUCAUSE. It’s aimed at professionals responsible for IT infrastructure in higher education, mostly librarian-types and computer-types. Again, few are lawyers.

Teaching in these settings is quite different from doing it in law school or presenting Continuing Legal Education courses to practicing lawyers, which I’ve also done. Among the fun challenges: my audiences in these two venues knew quite a lot about specific law applicable to their field. A doctoral student studying the social construction of privacy thinks deeply about its legal construction. A techie who runs course management software for a university has learned a lot of copyright rules. But they were not always familiar with basic legal concepts like the difference between statutory, judge-made, and regulatory law, or the interplay between state and federal requirements. More importantly, some of what they thought they knew was wrong. And there were some huge gaps. For example, I discovered that very few attending the higher ed IT event knew about 47 U.S.C. 230, a crucial immunity provision that generally protects from liability those who provide open online for a for user contributions, as many of their schools do (recent cases involve everyone from MySpace to Wikipedia). Finding the right level of specificity without assuming too much (correct) background knowledge was tricky.

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For more from Berkman Alum and current law professors William McGeveran, Tim Armstrong, and Derek Bambauer visit their blog Info/Law, which they started while at the Berkman Center in 2006.