Resources for Students
Maintained by James Grimmelmann
Current through November 2021
This page collects some of the most common resources I recommend for students who want to learn more about intellectual property, technology, and Internet law.
Law and Technology News
Media outlets with good dedicated coverage of technology law include:
Newsletters
- The Bloomberg BNA Law Reports, particularly the Electronic Commerce Law Report and the Privacy & Security Law Report, provide detailed coverage of recent cases. BNA unofficially stands for “Boring, Nevertheless Accurate.”
- Casey Newton’s Platformer started as access journalism for the newsletter age. But sometime in 2021, Newton hit his stride with perceptive takes on content-moderation dilemmas. The link roundup, which captures every important development at the major tech platforms, is indispensable.
- Tim Carmody’s Amazon Chronicles is a deep dive on all things Amazon. Carmody is a Renaissance blogger, with insights ranging from economics to aesthetics; he works hard to knit stories together and provide overarching insights.
- Charlie Warzel’s Galaxy Brain features thoughtful reflections on technology and society. It is a little less tech-focused since its move to The Atlantic, but when it is good, it is very good.
- Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day is a perceptive take on the weird and unsettling masses of seething brainworms that constitute social media today. You will learn more about where technology is going from it than you will from many more traditional tech-law sources.
- Ali Griswold’s Oversharing covers the sharing economy. Griswold’s takes are typically critical and well-supported. She is good at picking up and highlighting longer-term trends in what can sometimes feel like an incomprehensible churn of news.
- Matt Levine’s Money Stuff (subscribe here) is a daily column on finance. About a third of the stories feature strong tech angles, such as Levine’s
copyrighted patented trademark recurring feature, “Blockchain Blockchain Blockchain.” Levine is a hilarious writer; I guarantee at least one lol per issue.
- Vicki Boykis’s Normcore Tech fails at its mission of making tech “more boring.” Boykis does a great job ferreting out interesting stories that aren’t already being covered to death, and has a good big-picture view of the often-invisible institutions and technologies that keep the tech world humming. Her newsletter is only sometimes about law, but it is always fascinating, clever, and well-written.
- Matt Stoller’s BIG – an appropriate title from the author of Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy – is about “the politics of monopoly,” with a special focus on tech platforms, and on legal tools to rein them in. You don’t have to agree with his trust-busting point of view to find the newsletter a useful source of news and links.
- Ben Whitelaw’s Everything in Moderation is a short and readable summary of the most important news in content moderation, with a nice ability to surface important trends and non-U.S. developments.
- Rest of World is an outstanding publication, halfway between a newsletter and a magazine, that combines news stories, interviews, and original features into a compelling mix. The subject matter is broad, and the focus is truly global.
Blogs
There are a lot of legal blogs. These are a few of my favorites:
- Eric Goldman’s Technology & Marketing Law Blog is indispensable for keeping up with Internet law developments. Goldman makes a serious effort to write accessibly and he also follows significant legislative developments.
- Dennis Crouch’s Patently O is patent-focused, with occasional forays into other bodies of IP law.
- Rebecca Tushnet’s 43(B)log provides detailed summaries of false advertising, trademark, copyright, and right of publicity cases. Look for the material in bracket’s for Tushnet’s caustic editorial comments.
- The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Deeplinks reflects the EFF’s pro-user-rights policy positions on a range of issues including free speech, copyright, and network neutrality.
- Ben Thompson’s Stratechery looks at Internet platforms and their business models, with a focus on how scale and aggregation change everything. It can be repetitive, and sometimes the coverage of legal issues is shallow, but the writing and the diagrams are crystal-clear. The free version is weekly, but there is also a paid “daily” version with more frequent posts, and a podcast.
- At the Volokh Conspiracy, Eugene Volokh and Orin Kerr in particular regularly have interesting posts about recent tech cases. Volokh focuses on the First Amendment, Kerr on the Fourth.
Studying Law
I maintain a list of free and inexpensive casebooks that has excellent options for most subjects in the first-year law-school curriculum and most technology and IP subjects.
If you are taking a law-school class or reading primary legal materials for the first time, I highly recommend Orin Kerr’s How to Read a Legal Opinion, 11 Green Bag 2d 51 (2007). For EU law, Jasper Krommendijk and Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius have written primers for legislation and CJEU judgments.
If you need a more in-depth introduction to how the United States legal system works, E. Allan Farnsworth, An Introduction to the Legal System of the United States (4th ed. 2010) is a good primer. It is useful if you have studied law in another country, and if you have never studied law before. If you want a historical presentation, Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law (4th ed. 2019) is a well-respected standard.
Under Bryan Garner’s editing, Black’s Law Dictionary (now in the 11th edition, but used copies of previous editions are often much cheaper) has become the gold standard of legal dictionaries. But I’ll be honest: for 90% of your queries, a Google search is good enough.
As for what makes a good answer on a law-school-style exam, I highly recommend John Langbein’s essay Writing Law Examinations and Orin Kerr’s blog post Bad Answers, Good Answers, and Terrific Answers.
Writing Aids
Not all of Bryan Garner’s books are as good as Bryan Garner thinks they are. But his Modern English Usage (4th ed. 2016) is “extremely good” and for anyone writing about law, his Dictionary of Legal Usage (3d ed. 2011) is indispensable. This is the place to look to know whether to write “pleaded” or “pled.” Get in the habit of checking Garner whenever you’re not certain whether or how to use a legal term.
As for typography – the craft of arranging words on a page so they look nice and are easy to read – Matthew Butterick’s Typography for Lawyers (2d ed. 2015) is the best short reference in existence. It just happens to be written by a lawyer for other lawyers. It covers everything from how to type accented characters to how to format block quotations nicely.
Research Networks
If you are doing scholarly research in technology law, you should be plugged into the networks for scholars working in the area. Some notable conference and workshop series include the following.
In law and computer science:
In intellectual property:
- The IP Scholars Conference (IPSC)
- The Works in Progress in IP (WIPIP) conference, which rotate from school to school, are large events with strong communities
- The Junior Scholars in IP workshop is a smaller event that provides more intensive feedback for participants
In Internet law:
In privacy law:
In addition, there are several mailing lists that are homes to interesting discussions and announcements:
I am happy to discuss which of these events and lists are most relevant to your interests.
Productivity Software
I use a Mac, so my advice here is Mac-centric.
Word Processing: Word does everything adequately and nothing well. It’s an acceptable default choice, and sometimes the only available choice. The only thing that Pages is missing for serious legal writing is automatic cross-references. If you can get by without them, it is far less frustrating to work with.
Spreadsheets: Excel is the category leader and is a powerful workhorse for sophisticated models. For quickly making nice-looking spreadsheets, Numbers is a decent alternative.
Presentations: Everyone rags on PowerPoint, often with good reason. It works well enough much of the time, but it can and will destroy your formatting in frustrating and hard-to-diagnose ways. If you can, use Keynote instead, which is simply a superlative piece of software.
Design: If you need sophisticated photo editing, graphic design, or desktop publishing, Adobe Creative Cloud is the best-known suite of tools. It is also shockingly expensive. Affinity’s suite of tools (Publisher, Designer, and Photo) is a great alternative, and far more affordable. All three apps are powerful, fully featured enough for most purposes, and very thoughtfully designed.
Diagrams: If you need to draw some shapes with lines connecting them, OmniGraffle is a fine choice. I’ve used it happily for over a decade.
Calculations: If you need to do the kind of calculations you need to double-check, use a program that lets you show your work. Calca and Soulver are both genius.