To boldly go: Empirical research in intellectual property rights teaching

The last decade has seen a healthy increase in empirical legal scholarship on Intellectual Property issues, with scholars deploying a range of methods from social sciences to examine questions about the nature, role, and value of IP rights. Such empirical research provides valuable insights into how IP law operates in action, revealing the impact of IP as a legal phenomenon on businesses, industries, social institutions, creators, inventors, rights owners, users, and the general public, as well as contributing to a more nuanced understanding of the key contestations and normative debates within IP law. While these are compelling reasons to broaden the IP curriculum to engage students with such empirical scholarship, doing so within law schools can be particularly challenging as the undergraduate legal curriculum tends to provide limited exposure to empirical legal research and socio-legal perspectives.

This chapter shares the experience of developing and running a postgraduate taught course in which students engage with the latest empirical research on IP, and critically examine it to understand the role and impact of IP in the real world. It includes examples of teaching and assessment techniques and student-focused strategies that can facilitate embracement and learning by IP law students of the ‘empirical unknown’. Section 1 outlines the origin of the course and Section 2 provides a brief summary of the rationale for teaching empirical research on IP rights to law students. Sections 3-5 discuss course aims, course structure and activities, and assessments, accompanied by practical examples to assist IP educators wishing to introduce empirical legal scholarship in their own teaching. Section 5 concludes with reflections on the key successes and challenges encountered over the lifetime of the course.