On November 10, Professor of Clinical Law Jason Schultz, director of NYU Law’s Technology Law and Policy Clinic, and the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy welcomed a host of current and former clinic students to Greenberg Lounge to celebrate the clinic’s 10th anniversary. The all-day event included four panels in which past and present clinic participants discussed different aspects of the impact the clinic has made on them and their work.
Introducing the event, Jeanne Fromer, Walter J. Derenberg Professor of Intellectual Property Law and vice dean for intellectual life, talked about the importance of the clinic to the NYU Law curriculum. “The clinic’s work has enabled a robust education here at NYU in intellectual property, information law, and technology law by giving students a hand in working on and advancing cutting-edge issues in the field,” said Fromer, “and enabling them to apply the intellectual property and tech law offerings that they have in the non-clinical space…to real-world situations.”
Expressing marvel at the range of the work that the clinic has taken on, Fromer cited projects such as counseling a library on laws related to open-source software production and its e-book lending app; filing public records requests and lawsuits to inform the public about government surveillance programs; supporting an artist in a copyright case involving appropriation art and fair use; and working with a group of activists challenging patent monopolies on life-saving drugs.
“There’s a misperception oftentimes of technology law and policy and intellectual property as being a private law subject,” Fromer added. She offered the Technology Law and Policy Clinic as a counterexample: “Exhibit A is the work that this clinic does, because it underscores how enmeshed the public interest is in these fields.”
In his own remarks, Schultz recalled how, as a 2L at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, he had joined other students in petitioning for an IP and technology clinic, making a case to the faculty for why such an offering was important. Schultz went on to teach the clinic at Berkeley Law before being invited to NYU Law. During his visit at the Law School, he met with a group of students who had initiated the same sort of petition, and Schultz was convinced to come to NYU Law to start a clinic there.
“If dozens of students show up on a Saturday morning for anything other than an exam review,” he said, “you know that this is something that actually matters to them.”
During a panel of clinic alumni who have become clinical teachers, Peter Steffensen ’17, now a law fellow with the First Amendment Clinic at Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law, explained how, in the NYU Law clinic, he had found “people who were the model of lawyer that I wanted to be and sort of showed me what was possible in terms of bringing care and empathy and compassion—not just into the actual legal work, but into the way that you treat each other.”
Posted December 6, 2023