Advertising & Marketing Law Syllabus for Spring 2011

By Eric Goldman

Next semester, I am teaching Advertising & Marketing Law for the first time. My syllabus. This is a brand-new course built from the ground up. As teaching materials, I will be using an early draft of a new casebook that Rebecca Tushnet and I are co-authoring. I’ll have more to say about the book later. I will also be relying heavily on Rebecca’s database of artifacts/props. If you teach in the IP/Internet/advertising law area and don’t already have access to the database, you should contact her.

As you’ll see in the syllabus, I am experimenting with several different grading options for the students. Among other things, I am participating in the Wikipedia Public Policy Initiative and allowing students to edit Wikipedia for a grade. See my recap of my prior experiment with graded Wikipedia assignments. I’ll be interested to see how many students choose that option. [Note: I have more to say about my 2005 prediction of Wikipedia’s demise shortly.]

I was absolutely blown away by student interest in the course. Over 80 students tried to enroll in the course! I had deliberately capped the course enrollment at 18 because of the course’s experimental status as well as the fact that it’s a voluntary uncompensated overload. As a result, I had a LONG list of disappointed students.

Based on this surprisingly high level of student interest and the course’s relevance to new lawyers (many of whom will quickly encounter advertising law issues in their practices), I believe that many law schools would benefit from offering the course. If you’re thinking about offering an advertising law course, I’d love to chat with you about it.