Today in my Constitutional Adjudication seminar, the "classroom court" heard argument by two students in Golan v. Holder, the case presenting the question whether Congress has the power under the Copyright Clause to remove works from the public domain, and if so, whether it did so in Section 514 of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act without violating the First Amendment.
In five years of teaching this seminar -- that's 45 Supreme Court cases orally argued and decided so far -- I'm not sure I've ever seen the eight student Justices more intensely engaged, or asking more tough, on-point questions. It was very impressive.
And here's the thing: if this exercise had occurred when I was in law school in the mid-1980s, I am confident that the typical student would have found the case a bit of a snooze-fest. To all but the intellectual property fans, I think it would have seemed like an arcane case about books and sheet music.
I suppose this is a mundane observation, but the intensity of the argument today really brought home for me how intellectual property has become sexy and interesting for this generation of law students who have grown up downloading and uploading and scanning and forwarding and attaching and burning and ripping. Intellectual property questions are both intuitive and important to them in ways that they just weren't to my generation.
Yes, but who won?
Posted by: Jason Mazzone | October 17, 2011 at 08:17 PM
6-3 to affirm.
Posted by: Eric Muller | October 17, 2011 at 09:19 PM
I looked at your course description -- what a well-conceived seminar idea!
Posted by: Brando | October 17, 2011 at 11:10 PM