Intellectual Property Law

Overview

The Intellectual Property Concentration is designed to better prepare students who wish to practice in the intellectual property field. It is also designed to create a sense of community among committed intellectual property students and the intellectual property faculty, facilitating networks for support and encouragement during students’ time at UC Hastings and beyond, into their careers. UC Hastings’ connections with Silicon Valley’s technology conglomeration, California’s art and entertainment industries, and San Francisco’s vibrant intellectual property firms uniquely position it to offer perspectives from all aspects of the practice. IP concentration students are offered courses taught by practitioners from boutique and multi-national firms and in-house counsel, in addition to full-time UC Hastings faculty.

Students are first required to learn the basics: Copyright, Trademarks, and Patents.

Students may then take courses from the array of electives and skills-based offerings. These electives enable students to gravitate toward one area of Intellectual Property law, such as Patents, while the required courses guarantee that they will be competent to practice in other intellectual property fields, as is likely to occur during the course of their careers.

The Concentration culminates during a student’s third year with the IP Concentration Capstone Seminar. The Concentration Capstone is designed to integrate what students have learned in the core and elective courses and invite them to consider what lies ahead. The seminar explores the challenges posed by globalization and technological advances that will shape intellectual property law during the next several decades, and considers how the current intellectual property regime is likely to change in response.