Patent Law

Patent law sits at the intersection of legal doctrine and technological innovation, and this course treats it as a working system rather than a set of rules to memorize: how exclusivity is justified, drafted into a patent document, contested in infringement disputes, and shaped by competing pressures from competition law. You'll read and parse real patent claims, run searches in patent databases during lab sessions, and work through novelty, obviousness, and prosecution-history problems, with a heavy focus on pharma and hi-tech contexts where the stakes are sharpest. It builds naturally on a general IP background and gives anyone heading toward technology transfer, R&D-heavy industries, or IP litigation the vocabulary to actually read what a patent is doing.