Elective Courses
Below is a list of some of the law technology-related courses that have been offered at NCCU Law. The listed courses are not necessarily offered every semester or every year. A list of Law & Technology-related Courses being offered will be provided to students prior to registration.
Students may also take their elective technology law course at another law school through the Inter-institutional Program. Students must seek approval from the Associate Dean of Technology & Innovation.
Access to justice” (also called “A2J”) is a multidimensional concept that eludes easy definition. This experiential course will use the term expansively to capture the ways in which our legal system does or does not respond to the legal needs of ordinary people. This course will examine the structural obstacles that impede access to justice for all as well as contemporary and technological opportunities for reform. Access barriers can have a variety of sources. Barriers can be doctrinal (e.g., the right to counsel), practical (e.g., courts’ ability to accommodate non-English-speaking litigants), economic (e.g., the rise of binding arbitration), or political (e.g., limited funding for legal aid offices), and nearly all are multifactorial. Similarly, opportunities for improvement can be found in doctrine, institutional design, community engagement, and technology. Compared to a course on substantive law, our focus will be on the institutional, procedural, technological, and practical dimensions of the access to justice problem. We will explore and utilize technological platforms as mechanisms to aid in combating the A2J crisis. The course will be divided into roughly three components. In Part I, we will consider theories and doctrines of legal access. In Part II, we will focus on legal technology platforms, particularly Gavel, a legal document automation platform, and how they work to combat access to justice challenges. In Part III, we will take a practical approach in proposing resolutions to an access problem through the use of technology. Students will serve as change agents in thinking innovatively on ways to better support and resolve barriers to the legal system. Students will consider access to justice in the areas of family law, housing law, fines and fees project, and criminal law.
This is a 3-credit hour combination class that includes Law School students and graduate-level Library and Information Science students. This course is team-taught by April G. Dawson, Associate Dean of Technology and Innovation and Professor of Law, and Siobahn Day Grady, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, School of Library and Information Science Program Director of Information Science Program. This course explores the topics, technology, and skills required to gain practice in the successful application of artificial intelligence to address key industry problems. As part of this course, students use the IBM Skills Academy practitioner training course to build their digital technological skills. The course places heavy emphasis on the legal and policy implications of AI. Upon successful completion of the course assignments, students will be eligible to enroll in Acclaim, IBM’s Digital Badge system, and receive a badge certifying completion of the IBM Artificial Intelligence course. Digital badges can be included in students’ digital signatures and shared on professional and social media networks.
This experiential course introduces students to the fundamentals of artificial intelligence and the many opportunities AI advancements present today and in the near future to automate and augment the delivery of legal services. We will explore modeling statutory reasoning, computational law, expert systems, predicting legal outcomes, information retrieval, machine learning, natural language processing, information extraction, and other related topics. The aim is to develop students' understanding of AI and their ability to deconstruct law, legal reasoning, and legal practice to engineer legal processes, applications, and systems that improve access to the law and legal services for everyone, from legal aid and the consumer market to corporations and governments facing increasingly complex multinational challenges. Students will complete a project, which requires that they design and build an AI-related application for law using tools that do not require prior programming experience. This course assumes that students are not familiar with programming. While programming is not the focus of this class, students will learn pseudocode and sufficient coding basics to complete the course project and engage with lawyers, legal knowledge engineers, technologists, operations professionals, and other professionals engineering the future of legal services.
As the integration of AI technologies across various sectors continues to expand, the need for professionals who can navigate the legal, ethical, and governance challenges of AI has become critical. This course bridges the gap between legal education and the technical demands of AI governance, preparing students to become leaders in this emerging field. It is designed to equip law students with comprehensive knowledge and skills required for AI governance professionals. By the end of this course, students will have a solid understanding of AI governance and the legal landscape. Additionally, students will be prepared to take the IAPP AIGP certification exam and contribute to the development of ethical and responsible AI systems.
This 3-credit writing seminar is introductory course in Intellectual Property and Legal Technology to introduce students to a doctrinal course which dissects the legal emerging issues in the artistic world revolving around authorship, ownership and the use of Artificial Intelligence. The course will provide an overview of the legal regime protections in Intellectual Property: Copyrights, specifically utilized by artists in the creation, production, monetization and distribution of visual works of art. The course will identify how the legal protections in IP are affected by and evolving with the newly emergent technologies such as AI, Midjourney and Non-fungible Tokens (NFTs), affecting authentication in the art world. The course will provide a comparative study on how the effect of emergent technologies differs according to the medium used by the visual artist: graphic, illustrative, sculpture, mixed media.
This 3-credit hour experiential course will provide practical contract and contract negotiation skills that students will apply in their law careers. Students will learn contract planning skills, key principles of drafting software, SaaS and technology-based agreements, how to use contract forms and other resources, how to draft to manage risk, contract management/docketing, and basic contract negotiation skills. Students will also learn how to well serve and represent clients – in a timely, professional, balanced, and effective manner – in matters of contract negotiating, drafting, and management.
This 1-hour lab is an experiential course for students who have or are taking the Private Sector Privacy Laws course or the European Private Sector Privacy Laws would be eligible for this class. Other students my enroll with professor approval. This course provides an in-depth exploration of privacy frameworks and their applications in business contexts. Through a combination of lectures, discussions, case studies, and hands-on projects, students will learn how to implement and manage privacy practices in various industries. The course will cover privacy implications under HIPAA, global privacy regulations, and other relevant laws, focusing on practical applications and real-world scenarios.
The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) and the data privacy laws of individual European nations are among the world’s strictest, carrying high fines for improperly handling personal information. Although the GDPR was drafted and passed by the European Union (EU), it imposes obligations onto organizations anywhere so long as they target or collect data related to people in the EU. This 2-credit class aims to help students deeply understand European laws, regulations, and policy frameworks. The curriculum includes explanations of European regulatory structures; concepts of data protection; and significant laws, including the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive. The final exam for this class is the IAPP CIPP/E exam.
Federal Government Contracting: Realistic and Relevant Legal Training, Scenarios, and Outcomes, is a 3-credit experiential course that strives to equip students with substantive, experiential learning that teaches them about the processes, statutes, regulations, and workstreams that comprise the federal acquisitions lifecycle. In addition to foundational principles of government contracts law, students will learn important in-demand skills relating to the intersection of procurement law, government agencies, and the private sector. They will learn how to apply their skills to expanding and rewarding potential practice areas that they may not have known existed. The class will be taught by two active government contracts attorneys who have experience handling civilian, defense, national security, aerospace, and healthcare government contracts matters. It will feature a mix of classroom learning, as well as realistic exercises, such as: source selection evaluation board simulations; contract management fact pattern assessments; incident-based procurement ethics rules analyses; and legal reviews of proposal development efforts and bid submissions.
The following Intellectual Property courses also count towards the Law & Technology Certificate:
Note: NCCU School of Law is the only law school in North Carolina that is certified by the USPTO to assist the public with both patent and trademark preparation, filing, and prosecution. UNC-Chapel Hill Law School and Wake Forest Law School are certified for trademark only.
Privacy and data security issues are becoming increasingly important to businesses, individuals and government in light of new information technologies. This course will explore the roots of US privacy law, its evolution in the 21st century, and the challenges of regulating information where institutions and "data subjects" need and reveal information constantly, but also seek basic privacy. We will also consider the comprehensive European Data privacy law, which virtually all large U.S. companies need to know. This class is taught by Mimi Afshar, Clinical Associate Professor and Director-IP Clinic.
The purpose of this class is to engage students in thinking about the nature of law (jurisprudence) in the information age. The class begins by locating contemporary issues in the context of philosophical speculations about the nature of law, as that topic has been understood in Anglo-American legal philosophy since 1900. We will be particularly concerned with making law into a science (“naturalism”). The course considers complexity theory, which is concerned with emergent order (the kind of order in the behavior of groups of agents, as in, for example, a hive of ants or a flock of birds). Complex systems are special forms of emergent order that are now studied in law through computational methods. The course considers how studying complex systems suggests an order can contribute to a general understanding of the nature of law. The course concludes by examining New Materialism, a recent development in social thought that seeks to reconcile philosophy with developments in the metaphysical commitments of the natural sciences. For example, recent developments in language models describe linguistic features in terms of complex systems with features analogous to quantum events. New Materialism has enthusiastic followers in many fields, including feminist thought, race theory, and queer studies. It has been insightfully applied to environmental questions, criminology, commercial law, and constitutional law.
Automated systems, some of which we call artificial intelligence, are so common today that they intertwine in our lives in complex ways that are sometimes so subtle that we miss their significance. Nonetheless, they can have significant influence on human rights and the well-being of society since they encode biases and popularize commercially useful visions of a good life, which is sometimes far from truly good. This course examines the major frameworks, pathways, and writings for influencing AI policy. It then examines various specific legal issues. It will fulfill the upper-level writing requirement by writing policy statements/reports and a research paper on a particular issue.
The rapid pace of technology evolution has drawn significant interest in data privacy and cybersecurity laws. This course aims to train students on data privacy regulations at the state and federal levels. This 2-credit hour course will train students on the following: (1) basic principles of data privacy; (2) privacy laws in the medical, financial, education, and communications sectors; (3) state and federal regulators of data privacy; and (4) best practices for protecting organizations from data privacy breaches. The final exam for this class is the IAPP CIPP/US exam.
The 2-credit hour course will analyze and discuss the contracting process, procedures and requirements for the purchase of goods and services, including commercially available technology, by the U.S. federal government.