Patent Law

Patently O Identifies Top IP Law Schools

By Les Weinstein, Michael Young, John Leo Wagner, Eric van Ginkel, and Victoria Pynchon

Here's a law school ranking list for that small but elite group of aspirants to the legal trade -- engineers who want to be lawyers (my brain burns at the cognitive dissonance)  -- Dennis Crouch's Top Thirty [Law School] Patent Programs (Ranked by Patently-O Hits!)

Here are the top ten -- George Washington; University of Texas at Austin; DePaul; Columbia; U. of  Virginia; Boalt; Harvard University; U. of Tennessee; Cornell; and, Boston.  

The cognitive dissonance. 

Two reasons.  Reason One

I tutored 1-L's in Torts when I was a 2-L.  I was good at torts because I was good at story and fairness -- which is what torts is all about.  Students trained in engineering -- which is all about precision and accuracy -- were totally confounded by this subject.  

Having nearly failed high school geometry, its central frustrations remained particularly vivid at the time. 

"Work it like a geometry proof," I recall saying to my tormented first-year engineering law students.  "Just pick an answer and then rationalize it backwards."  That, at any rate, is how I recall being asked to work a proof.  And it seemed to help my most drastically perplexed first-years.

Reason Two

In practice, I litigated the right of oil and chemical companies to obtain insurance coverage for the environmental damage caused by the production, storage and transport of petroleum products and toxic chemicals.  Because the central question in this type of litigation is "what did the policyholders know about the damage they were causing and when did they know it" I took the depositions of dozens of engineers.

Engineers!  The most honest, forthright and helpful deponents alive; nearly incapable of the cautious "coached" deposition answer; congenitally adverse to saying "I don't know" or "I don't remember;" and, deeply committed to telling the absolute and entire truth.

Why?

Because their entire training and practice focuses on precision and accuracy.  They are zero tolerance men and women.  Listen, you get the lunar explorer to the moon or you don't.  There is no middle ground.

So, engineer-lawyers, particularly engineer-litigators and trial attorneys have always amazed me.  To be capable of radical precision and creative truth-telling at the same time requires the kind of intelligence that F. Scott Fitzgerald called "first rate." 

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. 

There you have it.   An entire post that is nothing but a digression.  It had to happen at some point. 

I'm greatly looking forward to Dennis' next promised list -- the ten (or more) top law firm procrastinators measured by their Patently-O hits. 

We call this productive procrastination here at the IP ADR Blog Dennis.  Thanks for the enabling lists!

Full post as published by IP ADR Blog on January 14, 2008 (boomark / email).