Law School Briefs – 11/9/11

Law School Briefs is Indiana Lawyer’s section highlighting news from law schools in Indiana. While IL has always covered law school news and continues to keep up with law school websites and press releases for updates, we gladly accept submissions for this section from law students, professors, alumni, and others who want to share law school-related news. If you’d like to submit news or a photo from an event, please send it to Jenny Montgomery at [email protected], along with contact information for any follow-up questions at least two weeks in advance of the issue date.

ND hosts New Jersey governor

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie will deliver the keynote address at the one-day symposium “Educational Innovation and the Law” at 2:30 p.m. Nov. 18 in the Patrick F. McCartan Courtroom at the Notre Dame Law School. The symposium is free and open to the public.

The event is part of the 2011-2012 Notre Dame Forum, “Reimagining School: To Nurture the Soul of a Nation,” a yearlong discussion about issues that shape the national debate about education in kindergarten through high school.

Hosted by the Notre Dame Law Review, the symposium will consider a wide range of legal issues related to education, including the education gap, school choice, charter schools, labor issues and the effects of the current state and local fiscal crises on public education. Two panels of legal scholars will discuss issues surrounding educational innovation and the law.

Christie is New Jersey’s 55th governor and formerly served as the state’s United States attorney. He drew national attention for his efforts in battling political corruption, corporate crime, human trafficking, gangs, terrorism and polluters. He led a widely acclaimed charge against public corruption, winning convictions or guilty pleas in cases involving more than 130 public officials, both Republican and Democrat, without losing a case.

IU partners with Oxford in program

Indiana University Maurer School of Law has signed an agreement with the Oxford Internet Institute, a department of the University of Oxford, creating a new program that will allow students to earn a certification in information law and policy from the British university and a Master of Laws degree from IU Maurer School of Law.

Aimed primarily at international students, the new program will give students with an American law degree or non-U.S. equivalency the opportunity to take 14 to 16 credit hours of existing regular law courses in the broad area of information and intellectual property law.

Students admitted to the program will spend the fall semester in Bloomington and the spring term at Oxford, where they will take specialized courses and complete a 10,000-word thesis. The thesis provides students the opportunity to apply the methods and approaches covered during their coursework and carry out a substantive piece of academic research on an information law and policy-related topic of their choice.

Students who complete 24 credit hours from IU or the equivalent and an acceptable thesis will receive a Master of Laws (LL.M.) degree from the IU Maurer School of Law and a Certificate in Information Law and Policy from the OII.

A faculty member from the Bloomington law school will spend most, if not all, of the spring semester in Oxford overseeing the students’ work. Students are expected to complete the program within one year.

Distinguished Professor Fred H. Cate, who directs IU’s Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, and Oxford’s Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, professor of Internet governance and regulation, will lead the program, which has an initial term of three years beginning in the fall of 2012.

In 2001, the University of Oxford founded the OII as a department for the study of the societal implications of the Internet. The institute’s faculty members are engaged in a variety of research projects covering social, economic, political, legal, technical and ethical issues of the Internet in everyday life.•