Intellectual Property Law

Be informed by renowned IP scholars

LLM in Intellectual Property Law

BU Law consistently ranks as one of America’s premier law schools in intellectual property. Our rich and vibrant LLM in Intellectual Property Law program will challenge, stimulate and enlighten you through rigorous courses and close working relationships with renowned BU Law faculty. You will learn from the country’s most distinguished scholars in copyright, patent and trademark law—as well as from practitioners who work on the leading edge of Internet and biotechnology issues.

Ideal candidates are either foreign lawyers with extensive backgrounds in intellectual property studies and practice, or domestic students with strong academic and professional backgrounds who have not yet had significant academic exposure to U.S. intellectual property law studies.

As an LLM student, you will be immersed in the School’s expansive and heralded intellectual property law curriculum, a specialty area in which BU Law ranks 7th nationally in the U.S. News & World Report specialty rankings (2011). You will receive both fundamental and advanced intellectual property law training and will learn the theory, policy and practical aspects of protecting intangible goods.

You will study in one of the world’s leading high-tech centers. Boston is the ideal place to study intellectual property. Some of the country’s foremost IP practitioners teach in the program, bringing practical expertise and experience to the classroom. As a result, you will not only learn theory, but also gain practical perspective on how traditional notions of property and ownership have been radically transformed by digital technology and electronic networks.

You will delve deeply into an area of intellectual property law doctrine. You will produce a scholarly work through a faculty-supervised thesis. This is a rare opportunity to study one-on-one with a top national scholar and produce a substantial analytical research paper on a specific topic of your choice. (While the program welcomes applications from foreign-trained lawyers, candidates whose native language is not English may prefer to pursue the LLM in American Law Program, which offers a concentration in intellectual property law—and the same classes as the LLM in Intellectual Property Law Program—without a thesis requirement.)

You will explore intellectual property from interdisciplinary, comparative and global perspectives. You will take your law classes through the JD curriculum. In these classes, domestic and foreign-trained students sit side-by-side, sharing their views on the legal and transnational issues of global technology. The comparative and international perspective you will gain at BU Law will prepare you for global work. You will also be able to enroll in intellectual property classes at Boston University’s world-renowned School of Management and College of Communication.

Program Information

Degree Requirements

To earn the LLM in Intellectual Property Law degree, you must complete a minimum of 24 credit hours—with at least 10 credits a semester—and obtain a final weighted average of at least 2.30 (C+). The LLM program is designed to be completed in one academic year of full-time study and follows the School’s JD calendar, with classes beginning in late August and ending in May.

Candidates with foreign law degrees must take Introduction to American Law and a Legal Research and Writing seminar (unless waived with the permission of the director), each for two credits in the fall semester. Foreign-trained students must complete their remaining 20 credits from intellectual property and related classes. Domestic-trained students must complete their 24 credits in intellectual property and related classes.

All students take three of the four core courses—Intellectual Property, Copyright, Patents, and Trademark & Unfair Competition. (The director may waive the core course requirement for students who have sufficiently completed essentially similar work at another law school.) All students complete a substantial three-credit analytical paper addressing an intellectual property law issue, either in connection with a seminar or as an independent study. The student’s faculty advisor will certify that the paper meets the standard of a substantial research and analytical undertaking in intellectual property law.

The Intellectual Property Law Speaker Series

The Intellectual Property Law Speaker Series is an important element of BU Law’s comprehensive IP program, bringing distinguished scholars from all over the world to interact with BU Law faculty and students in an exciting workshop setting.

Former guest speakers include:

• Yochai Benkler, Yale Law School
  Coase’s Penguin or Linux and the Theory of the Firm
  
• Dan Burk, University of Minnesota Law School
  Fair Use Infrastructure for Copyright Management Systems
  (co-author Julie Cohen)
  
• Rosemary Coombe, York University (Toronto)
  Intellectual Property as Popular Culture: Subjectivity and Objectivity in Consumer Culture
  
• Dennis Crouch, Boston University
  The Patent Lottery
  
• Abraham Drassinower, University of Toronto Law School
  
• Rochelle Dreyfuss, New York University Law School
  Expressive Genericity
  
• John Duffy, George Washington University
  Intellectual Property for Market Innovation
  
• Rebecca Eisenberg, University of Michigan Law School
  Patent Law
  
• Terry Fisher, Harvard University Law School
  Digital Music
  
• Jane Ginsburg, Columbia University Law School
  The Concept of Authorship in Comparative Copyright Law
  
• Lewis Hyde, Kenyon College
  Copyright and Gift
  
• Sonia Katyal, Fordham University School of Law
• Edmund Kitch, University of Virginia Law School
  The Nature and Function of the Patent System
• The Honorable Alex Kozinski, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
  Barbie and Other Copyright/Trademark Conundrums
• William Landes, University of Chicago Law School
  The Economics of Copyright
• Richard Lanham, University of California, Los Angeles
  Expert Witnessing in Copyright Litigation
• Douglas Lichtman, University of Chicago
  Strategic Disclosure in the Patent System
• Jessica Litman, Wayne State University Law School
  The Public Domain
• The Honorable Richard Posner, University of Chicago; U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit
  Indefinitely Renewable Copyright
• Pamela Samuelson, University of California, Berkeley, School of Law
  CONTU Revisited
• Seana Shiffrin, UCLA School of Law
• Sandra Strokoff, Office of the Legislative Counsel, U.S. House of Representatives
  Legislative Drafting with Particular Relevance to Copyright Law
• Steven Wilf, University of Connecticut School of Law