The mission of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology (BCLT) is to foster beneficial and ethical advancement of technology by promoting the understanding and guiding the development of intellectual property and related fields of law and policy as they intersect with business, science and technology.
Recognizing the critical importance of intellectual property and other aspects of the legal system to the development of high-technology industries and the new information economy, Professor Peter Menell, Professor Robert Merges and Raymond Ocampo ’76 (retired senior vice president, general counsel and secretary of Oracle Corporation) founded BCLT in 1996. They created the center to develop an unparalleled program for training future lawyers and to serve as a place where distinguished faculty members from the university, leading lawyers and entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley, and national policymakers could exchange ideas about the increasingly important intersection of law and technology.
These BCLT founders have since been joined by Professor Pamela Samuelson (a leading authority on the new information economy) and Professor Howard Shelanski '92 (telecommunications law specialist). Robert Barr (former Vice President for Intellectual Property and Worldwide Patent Counsel for Cisco Systems) was recently hired as BCLT's Executive Director.
As BCLT has grown, it has broadened its mission beyond the intellectual property core to encompass antitrust, electronic commerce, entertainment law, biomedical ethics, telecommunications regulation, cyberlaw, privacy, and many other areas of constitutional and business law that are affected by new information technologies.
BCLT has developed the most comprehensive and innovative program in law and technology in the world. This program features three essential components:
strong foundational courses taught by Boalt faculty using their own leading casebooks;
diverse, challenging and regularly updated advanced courses taught by leading faculty and practitioners (such as alumnus Larry Sonsini ’66, a leading securities lawyer in Silicon Valley); and
closely supervised analytic writing and research oriented courses with a specific emphasis on law and technology issues.
Each year, the Berkeley Technology Law Journal and BCLT publish the Annual Review of Law and Technology, which includes more than two dozen student articles on the leading developments of the prior year.
Other opportunities for students to develop their skills include working with the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic and the Berkeley Technology Law Journal, the first student-edited journal to focus on the intersection of law and technology. Students may also broaden their experience by interning with a leading technology company or public office in the Bay Area, such as eBay, Lucas Digital, Homegain.com, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory or the UC Berkeley Technology Licensing Office.
Many students go beyond these curricular opportunities, working with BCLT’s directors to organize important educational, public policy and research events throughout the academic year. The center provides students with many opportunities to meet leading practitioners in the law and technology field. More than 35 law firms sponsor BCLT and participate in a wide variety of events at Boalt Hall.
BCLT holds at least one major conference and multiple smaller roundtable events each year. Recent conferences include: Spyware: The Latest Cyber-Regulatory Challenge (March 2005); Ideas Into Action: Implementing Reform of the Patent System (April 2004); The Law and Technology of Digital Rights Management (March 2003); and the Fourth Annual Roundtable on Digital Content-Filesharing Technology in Napster's Wake (April 2002).
Each February the center organizes Law and Technology Month, which features a series of career panels that explore opportunities in many aspects of law and technology. In addition the center works with the Federal Judicial Center to provide educational programs for the federal judiciary.
