How Not to Moot

Bradford University Law Society has put together a useful series of short videos on mooting.

How Not to Moot‘ is both instructive and amusing.

Resources for Mooting

If your students haven’t yet visited the excellent Lawbore™ site, it’s tutorials are highly recommended. Lawbore™ is the City Law School’s (UK) legal portal. There is a very good set of tips for mooting there at http://learnmore.lawbore.net/index.php/Mooting_Top_Tips.

Here are the contents:

I think even the experts can enjoy these.

Manfred Lachs Space Law Moot Court Competition

The International Institute of Space Law (IISL) organises the The Manfred Lachs Space Law Moot Court Competition each year. It is an important part of the organisation’s outreach programme, and its principal mechanism for engaging future generations of space law experts. The competition is based on a hypothetical space law dispute before the International Court of Justice.

The World Finals for 2011 are to be held on 6 October 2011 at the High Court of Cape Town, South Africa. The problem for 2011 is the Case concerning Environmental Contamination and Harmful Interference in Space Activities (Zuris v. Nova Freedonia) written by Dr Patricia Sterns and Dr Les Tennen (United States).

Trusts and Equitable Obligations; a Free Resource

If you have, or would like to have, a copy of Pearce, Stevens, & Barr: The Law of Trusts and Equitable Obligations, and occasionally your students might be waiting for a mat, or just plain waiting and wondering what to do, here is a suggestion. Thay can load a glossary of Equity and Trusts terms onto their phones and have happy minutes learning them.

Give them this link for this free resource: http://www.oup.com/uk/orc/bin/9780199570638/01student/glossary/

 

How To Be a Patent Troll

If you’ve ever longed to be a patent troll (you have, haven’t you?), you may need to study:

‘Patent Acquisition and Assertion by a (Non-Inventor) First Party Against a Second Party’, United States Patent Application 20080270152.

To give you a flavour of Halliburton Energy Services Inc’s application, here is the Abstract:

Methods for a first party to acquire and assert a patent property against a second party are disclosed. The methods include obtaining an equity interest in the patent property. The methods further include writing a claim within the scope of the patent property. The claim is written to cover a product of the second party where the product includes a secret aspect. The methods further include filing the claim with a patent office. The methods sometimes include offering a license of the patent property to the second party after the patent property issues as a patent with the claim. The methods sometimes include asserting infringement of the claim by the second party after the patent property issues as a patent with the claim. The methods sometimes include negotiating a cross-license with the second party based on the assertion of infringement of the claim, where under the cross-license the first party obtains a license to an intellectual property right from the second party. The methods sometime include attempting to obtain a monetary settlement from the second party based on the assertion of infringement of the claim.

I find this application inspiring and must now return to drafting the Claims for my new ‘Random Nonsense Patent Generator’.