2L-3L Upper Level Lesson Topics

This lesson is designed to teach you the terms, i.e., the words of art, you will need to understand if you are studying Article 3 of the UCC which governs negotiable instruments.  It may be used as an introduction to these concepts or as a review or reinforcement of them.

This lesson deals with how trademark protection may be lost by abandonment, i.e. the discontinued use of a mark, the licensing of a mark in gross or an assignment of a mark in gross. This lesson is intended to be used as a supplement to the student's course material. It analyzes several issues that arise from the non-use or limited use of a mark, the licensing or assignment of a mark, as well as the considerations that follow the resumption of use of an abandoned mark.

This lesson builds on the concepts that you may have been introduced to in Professor Robert Lind's lesson on the classification of marks, e.g., generic marks, descriptive marks, suggestive marks, arbitrary marks, and fanciful marks. Specifically, this lesson will concentrate on the validity of a mark for trademark protection purposes when the trademark or trade dress is not inherently distinctive.

This lesson was written as a review of the material covered in Chapter 5 of the CALI e-book, Wetlands Law: A Course Source. The lesson reviews whether activities such as landclearing, ditching, draining, sidecasting, and deep ripping are regulated as "discharges" of dredged or fill material, and reviews the relationship between the Clean Water Act section 402 permit program and the Section 404 wetlands permit program.

This lesson examines the scope of one of the exclusive rights belonging to a copyright owner -- the right to create derivative works based on the copyrighted work, under 17 U.S.C. § 106(2).

The purpose of this lesson is to examine how administrative agencies create "rules," particularly in adjudicative contexts. The goal is to contrast so-called "legislative procedures" with "adjudicative procedures," and then to examine the scope and limits of adjudicative authority. The lesson is intended for students who have studied these issues in class and wish to refine their knowledge.

Part I of this lesson is designed to explain why certain types of damage awards must be adjusted to their "present value," and to demonstrate precisely how those adjustments are actually calculated. Part II of this lesson addresses the related concept of adjusting future pecuniary damage awards to account for the potential effects of future economic inflation. 

This lesson deals with the topic of administrative inspections. Governmental officials conduct inspections in a variety of contexts. Some of these inspections are conducted by the police. Others are conducted by special administrative officials charged only with the task of carrying out certain administrative tasks. As we shall see, the United States Supreme Court has developed special rules governing such inspections. In this lesson, we examine those special rules in depth.

Many administrative agencies have their own judicial structures (often referred to as "quasi-judicial" structures). In this lesson, we examine the development of one type of judge used in those structures, the so-called administrative law judge.

This lesson was written as a review of the material covered in Chapter 3 of the CALI e-book, Wetlands Law: A Course Source. The lesson reviews basic principles of administrative law, including the nature of agencies, limits on agency authority, procedural requirements for agency action (rulemaking and adjudication), and basic principles of judicial review of agency action.