Issue 5
![handle is hein.journals/hlrec114 and id is 49 raw text is: AMERICA'S FIRST LAW SCHOOL NEWSPAPER
-The Harvard Law-
ECO.RD
35 CENTS VOLUME II 4, No. 5 THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2002
Welfare HLS Style:
Summer public interest
funding, Ezra Rosser
writes, are middleclass
charity for 1Ls .... P. 5
The Internet Left: In
opposing the 1998
Copyright Term
Extnesion Act, Arkadi
Gemey argues liberals
are inviting in the
imperial court ...... P. 6
Sore Winners: In a
letter to the Canadian
figure skaters, Jennifer
Greengold says the duo
should tkae a hint from
HLS students and settle
fora B+ ........ P. 4
Undrinkable: The
global neoliberal elite
offers privatization, and
commercialization, Cliff
Ginn says, but the rest of
the world is dying of
thirst ........ .. . P. 5
Monster's Ball: Halle
Berry's latest film, Julie
Strom writes, is a film
that mostly avoids
preaching ....... P. 9
Comic Dorks: The
new Justice League,
Ken Walczak writes, has
dropped the space mon-
key and actually satis-
fies the comic b
crowd .......
Unrelentingly
With song titles
Sex Sells and
(Unfortunately)
Buying, Jeff L
Piebald just has
being a silly bar
CONTEI
NEWS.
FORUM
LETTERS
Music REVIEV
FENNO
MOVIE REVIE'
TV REVIEW
COMICS
Profs win cert in copyright case
by Mike Wiser
When the 1998 Sonny Bono
Copyright Term Extension Act
(CTEA) passed, Prof. Lawrence
Lessig was not happy. CETA
marked the l1th time that
Congress had extended the
copyright term in the past 40
years, and Lessig felt that that
the practice of extending the
copyright was robbing the pub-
lic domain of works that would
otherwise be lost.
It was then, according to Prof.
Charlie Nesson, that Lessig
decided to challenge the law.
What I remember is Larry
coming up with the idea, born of
his rage at the Sonny Bono
Copyright Extension, of chal-
lenging it and seeing if we could
get the challenge to the Supreme
Court of the United States,
Nesson said. And so [Professor
Jonathan] Zittrain, Lessig and I
sat around and came to the con-
clusion that we'd have a try at
it.
After a loss in a District Court
and the Court of Appeals for the
D.C. Circuit, Lessig will finally
get a chance to convince the
Supreme Court that Congress
exceeded its authority when it
passed CTEA. On February
19th the Court agreed to hear
Eldred v. Ashcroft, No. 01-618,
Lessig's challenge to CTEA.
Challenging assumptions
Almost everything about
Eldred was unconventional. The
issue, whether Congress' ability
to extend the term of copyrights
is limited by either the First
ERI\ BERNSTEIN R
Staff at the Berkman Center work on research and litigation related to the
Internet. The Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge that the Center has
been working on to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.
Amendment or Article I, had
never been directly litigated.
The case itself would be run by
the school's Berkman Center for
Internet and Society, an organi-
zation originally founded for
research as much as litigation.
Even more unusual, the team
decided to develop the legal
arguments for Eldred by using a
method called Openlaw that
allowed anyone to participate in
the project.
From the start the Eldred case
was designed to challenge
Congress's authority to extend
the copyright on older works by
20 years and the copyright on
newer works to the creator's
lifetime plus 70 years. It's really
not that important who Eric
Eldred is, but it happens that he
publishes public domain works
on the Internet.
[The case] was conceived
from the beginnink to raise an
issue of importance and crafted
not to be dependent on findings
of fact. And that left it an instru-
ment that Larry could wield.
And he sw ings a pretty good
sword, Nesson said.
With a plaintiff, Lessig and
the Berkman team turned to the
Internet community to help
draft their case. The idea was
that the team could draw on the
model of open-source program-
ming that is used for software
like Linux. Under the model, the
team's legal arguments are post-
ed on the Internet for visitors to
comment on and contribute to.
We're testing the idea that
the sort of 'parallel processing'
that goes on in open-source
software development can be
used effectively, in some cases,
in developing a legal argu-
ment, Lessig told Wired in
1999.
According to Lessig and
Nesson, the project was a suc-
cess.
We would also not be here
Please see COPYRIGHT, p. 3
by Meredith McKee
look Halfway through the 2001-2002 academic
P. 10 year, HLS is well into its IL experiment.
The school is currently test-driving
changes to the first-year program that were
Cute: recommended by last year's Strategic Plan in
an effort to reinvigorate Harvard's approach
like to legal education.
The first installment of this series reported
I'm the almost uniformly positive response of
students, faculty and staff to the 80-student
een says IL sections and law colleges concept. But
fun this second article addresses some of the
nd.. P. 8 more controversial changes, as well as those
that have garnered little public discussion:
, the introduction of the First-Year
4TS Lawyering (FYL) program, with a new cur-
riculum, new teaching approach and new
2 grading scale;
n. a requirement for individualized written
4 feedback in every first-year class; and
m the increased number of spring electives
7 open to 1L students.
While some of these changes are too recent
w. 8 to have garnered much response, others have
. 8 been subject to extensive critique.
w 9 A popular target
Of all the changes made to the first-year
I 0 program, the new FYL program, which
replaced Legal Research and Argument
I (LRA), has elicited the most vocal response.
A fall survey of I Ls, conducted by represen-
tatives from the Law Student Council (LSC),
revealed mixed reactions to the new pro-
gram.
J.D. Dean Todd Rakoff says the changes
introduced by the FYL program are particu-
larly dramatic because unlike other things,
FYL was a new curriculum as well as ne~x
people. As a result, he says, FYL has to be
seen as something that's more in a shake-
down phase than some of these other
[changes].
The change
FYL differs from LRA in two key ways,
emphasizing a new curriculum and structural
changes to increase personal feedback for
every 1L.
The new curriculum was built around the
concept of adding skills and putting writing
and research in challenging lawyering con-
texts, says Visiting Prof. Michael Meltsner,
who serves as FYL's director.
We wanted to have something more than
just abstract reading and writing, he says.
As part of meeting that goal, in its first
year FYL experimented with several mod-
ules, inviting Harvard faculty to give
instruction on topics such as negotiating,
decision-making and the legal profession.
In the spring segment of the program,
which focuses on the first-year Ames compe-
tition, students in each section now work on
the same case so that they can discuss case
law and strategy with teachers, Meltsner
says. In LRA, students in each section
worked on five or six different cases, inhibit-
ing their ability to talk specifics.
FYL also expanded the time dedicated to
research training, a move that was motivated
by a desire to improve the competitiveness of
HLS students, Meltsner says.
Some people felt that Harvard students
weren't as prepared as other students to do
research in the summer, he says. We were
sending students out at a disadvantage.
Structurally, each 80-persorn FYL lecture is
now taught by a full-time Lecturer on Law
with practical legal experience, instead of by
an HLS professor devoted only part-time to
the course, and next year FYL is planning to
improve student-faculty rapport by having
lecturers hold classes with 40 students at a
time, Meltsner says.
In addition, the small workshops - which,
in LRA, were taught by a 2L or 3L student
from the Board of Student Advisors (BSA)
- are now team-taught by both a 2L and 3L.
All 2Ls take a mandatory spring class on
teaching before taking primary responsibility
for a workshop, Meltsner says.
This new structure allows students to get
more intensive feedback on legal writing
from faculty than 560 lLs ever received
Please see FYL, p. 2
w FL p- I
New FYL program elicits mixed response](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/hlrec114&div=6&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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