Law Schools Can't Meet the Demand for Courses on Internet Issues

But some critics question whether the topic warrants its own specialty

By KATHERINE S. MANGAN

When lawyers for the U.S. Copyright Office weighed in earlier this month on the landmark case over the online song-swapping service, Napster, students in a University of Pennsylvania cyberlaw course were one step ahead of them.

During their first class, they had debated the company's claim that it was

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protected by a key copyright law, and many of them had given Napster the thumbs down.

"Several students argued that Napster was overreaching, which is what the government concluded," says their professor, R. Polk Wagner.

For professors in the booming field of Internet law, keeping up with the latest legal battles being waged in cyberspace is both exhilarating and exhausting.

"There's a lot of media excitement about these issues, which make them fun to teach," says Mr. Wagner, an assistant professor of law. With few case studies to draw on and new legal issues springing up weekly, professors often teach by the seat of their pants, making up the curriculum as they go along.

Despite such challenges, cyberlaw is becoming one of the hottest new specialties at the nation's law schools. Drawn by the recent flood of Internet-related litigation and the promise of plentiful, high-paying jobs, students are cramming into these courses at more and more schools.

Law schools are scrambling to keep up, hiring more Internet-savvy professors and expanding their course offerings in specialties like intellectual property and computer law. Despite the flurry of activity, skeptics still question whether "Internet law" is distinctive enough from any other kind of law to warrant its own specialty.

Are law schools creating a specialty that makes about as much sense as "the law of the telephone," some question, or is the Internet, with its amorphous boundaries, so inherently different from anything that existed before that current laws don't apply?

Debating those issues is part of the fun, and the intellectual excitement, of teaching cyberlaw, according to those in the burgeoning field.

"The law that's being made now is going to be very important for the future of the economy, and students want to get into it at the beginning," says Steven J. Goode, associate dean for academic affairs at the University of Texas School of Law. The university has four or five courses each year that emphasize cyberlaw, and it's offering a seminar this fall on freedom of speech and the Internet.

Across the country, courses in Internet law, which are also sometimes labeled "Cyberlaw," "Computers and the Law," or "Technology and the Law," are wildly popular, according to interviews with dozens of law professors and deans around the country. Although no one, including the Association of American Law Schools, has any hard figures on classes being taught, they say there's plenty of anecdotal evidence that the field is growing significantly. For instance:

* Mark Lemley, a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley, created an Internet site called Cyberprof in 1995 to provide a forum for the handful of law teachers who were venturing into the new field. Since then, its membership has grown from 30 to 225 professors.

* Mr. Wagner, the Penn professor who's in his first year of teaching law, says he had to turn away nearly 100 students from his Internet law course this fall because the room only held 75 people.

* A seminar on Internet law this fall at Boston University School of Law drew 50 students for 25 slots, so it will be repeated in the spring. Says Michael J. Meurer, an associate professor of law who teaches other cyberlaw courses there: "My associate dean said interest seems to be unbounded. He told me anything I wanted to teach with dot-com in the name would be welcome."

The reasons for the field's popularity are varied.

Students who grew up with the Internet, downloading music from Napster and working on Microsoft software, feel comfortable with the subject matter. Instead of cracking open a dusty law book to read about a century-old property dispute, students can log on to their course's Web site and, using hyperlinks provided by the professor, jump from newspaper accounts of breaking cases to company Web sites and court opinions.

Of course, cyberlaw isn't the only specialty in which professors use the Internet and draw current cases into class discussions. But it's one field where such an approach is essential. Because the technology is changing so quickly, new legal questions arise almost daily.

Whose jurisdiction does a dispute fall into if an online buyer in Minnesota feels that a seller in Spain is giving him the shaft? How can an employer protect workers from offensive e-mail without violating someone else's free-speech rights? Can a company prevent unwanted visitors from "trespassing" on its Web page?

Students not only have a chance to explore how existing laws are or are not relevant in the new economy, they're also debating the policy implications of trying to govern the Internet. Rules that are too stringent could stifle the growth of the Internet and inhibit creativity, experts say.

"We need to be aware of the unintended consequences of our laws," says Mr. Meurer, the Boston University professor. "Take the Napster case, for example. If we block access to peer-to-peer file-sharing technology, we might regret the consequences if that stunts our ability to share files in other ways down the road."

But a hands-off approach could encourage abuse, the competing argument goes. If consumers feel that their privacy is being compromised and they have no legal recourse if an online company rips them off, they'll be more wary of doing business online.

"We're trying to hit a moving target. There are so many dimensions to Internet law that it's hard to keep up with all of the developments," says Ruth L. Okediji, a professor at the University of Oklahoma College of Law and incoming chairwoman of the Association of American Law Schools' Section on Law and Computers.

Still, is Internet law so different from other law that it warrants its own subspecialty? Maureen Anne O'Rourke, a law professor at Boston University, thinks so.

"For a long time, there was a sense that there's nothing new here," she says. "We're just applying existing law to a new technology."

Now that educators realize the Internet "really is different," they're offering more stand-alone courses, she says. Ms. O'Rourke heads the committee on computers and law for the law-schools association.

Margaret Jane Radin, a law professor at Stanford University who codirects the law school's Program in Law, Science & Technology, says separate cyberlaw courses serve a valuable purpose -- for now.

"Internet topics are going to have to permeate the rest of the curriculum, but it's going to take time because faculty lag behind the real world," she says.

In many law schools today, a trademark course might study recent cases in which a person who came up with a domain name like ''McDonald's" was challenged by a company holding an identical trademarked name. A constitutional-law class could delve into the question of whether public libraries are guilty of censorship when they install filters on their computers to keep children from viewing sexually explicit material on the Internet.

Mr. Wagner thinks that eventually all law classes will have an Internet component. "The law is an amazingly adaptive thing," he says. "It adapts to changes in society and the economy all the time. I'm not completely convinced that there's something radically new about Internet law. Once you cut through all the layers of technology, the issues are really very similar."

David G. Post, an associate professor of law at Temple University, advises students to study Internet law in the context of other specialties. "Law firms aren't going to have separate Internet departments," says Mr. Post, cofounder of Temple's Cyberspace Law Institute. "They want banking lawyers or copyright lawyers or patent lawyers who know something about the Internet.

He's made no apologies about promoting himself as a cyberspace specialist, even years ago, when his colleagues warned him it would kill his prospects of getting a job.

"When I went on the job market in the fall of 1996, I think I was the only person hired at a law school as a cyberspace specialist," Mr. Post says. "A lot of people advised me against it. They said I'm better off saying I'm an [intellectual property] guy who happens to be interested in cyberspace. I figured, I am who I am. I thought this was going to be big, and I wanted to find a place that was excited about it becoming big."

While many of the most ambitious Internet-law programs are springing up in high-tech corridors like Silicon Valley, a small Ohio law school is also packing students into its cyberlaw courses and seminars.

The University of Dayton School of Law has gone further than most law schools that offer a course or two in Internet law. It has a separate program on law and technology, with an emphasis on Internet law. The two courses and two seminars Dayton offers each year on cyberlaw have proven so popular that the school plans to expand its offerings, according to the program's director, Robert A. Kreiss.

Some Dayton law professors are using the Internet to put a newfangled twist on traditional law-school staples. Susan W. Brenner, for instance, has dedicated an online criminal-law seminar to "cybercrimes."

In addition to chatting online with agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Internet security experts, Dayton students have drafted model state laws to punish cybercriminals who send sexually harassing e-mail messages, hack into a company's computers, or threaten to blow up a government office.

Cyberlaw students are no doubt attracted by the hot job prospects in their field. Companies that sell their products over the Internet need lawyers who can jump in when legal challenges threaten to stymie the companies' marketing efforts.

The demand for Internet-savvy lawyers has pushed starting salaries for such specialists to $140,000 at some firms in parts of the country, including Silicon Valley and Boston. The promise of potential profits is drawing others to high-tech start-ups.

"We have very entrepreneurial students, and a lot of them want to go right into start-ups," says Ms. Radin of Stanford. "They're eager to talk to venture capitalists right away."

Increasingly, companies that are interested in hiring technologically savvy lawyers are shelling out money to support their education. Mitchell D. Kapor, founder of Massachusetts-based Lotus Development Corp., and the Markle Foundation, a New York-based philanthrophy that focuses on Internet issues, each donated $300,000 to a new clinic at Berkeley that examines the moral implications of the digital economy.

The clinic, which will represent clients who sue corporations or government agencies over copyright, privacy, and other disputes, also received a $2-million endowment from a Berkeley law professor, Pamela Samuelson, and her husband, Robert Glushko. He's a director at Commerce One, a Silicon Valley Internet-software company.

Meanwhile, George Mason School of Law officials tapped into Northern Virginia's booming high-tech industry to help support its National Center for Technology & Law, a think tank that opened last year. Fortified with $1-million in state money, the center provides a forum for business and government leaders to examine how the legal system should adapt to today's digital economy. Some 60 area companies have kicked in about $1.5-million to support the center's programs.

The issues that these and other cyberlaw programs are tackling are breathing new life into sometimes-staid legal studies.

"Sometimes you feel as if all the arguments have been made, and that you're just taking the facts of a case and plugging in existing law," says Boston's Ms. O'Rourke. "With the Internet, you're making the arguments that are helping to shape the law. It's very exciting."

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