Lawyers begin anti-spam training

US law students are enrolling in a new course geared specifically towards addressing the problems of unsolicited email.

The spam serving comes courtesy of Chicago's John Marshall Law School, and its associate professor David Sorkin, who's offering what he and his peers say may be the first law school course devoted to the subject of unsolicited commercial email.

Describing the summer seminar, entitled Current Topics in Information Technology Law: Regulation of Spam and Email Marketing, Sorkin wrote: "This seminar will investigate legal and policy issues raised by email marketing and spam. Topics to be addressed include litigation and legislation involving spam and email marketing; the application of tort law and other traditional doctrines to spam; concerns related to constitutionality, jurisdiction, extraterritoriality, privacy, content and public policy; regulatory perspectives; issues faced by internet service providers and legitimate email marketers; legal aspects of blacklisting and other anti-spam measures; and other relevant issues."

Sorkin, who in 1995 taught one of the first courses devoted to internet law and who maintains a web repository of passed and pending spam laws, has long touted the applicability of traditional law to the internet. He has warned against legislation drafted specifically for online contexts, saying that new spam bills, in particular, have the potential to worsen the problem they're designed to alleviate.

Sorkin's summer students will be able to bone up on a fresh batch of spam legislation. At the federal level, a bill gathering steam on Capitol Hill would impose steep fines and prison terms on spammers. House and Senate members are in the process of drafting several other bills.

At the state level, the California Senate this season advanced its own anti-spam legislation. And major internet corporations, including Microsoft, Yahoo! and AOL Time Warner, have stepped up their anti-spam efforts on the litigation, legislation and education fronts.

In an email exchange, Sorkin said his course was "probably" the first law school seminar focused on spam, an assertion one colleague at a competing law school backed up.

Eric Goldman, an assistant professor at Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, said: "Yes, that would be a first. It looks like a nicely constructed course. David is one of the leading academics on the spam topic."

As an indication of how fast the spam law landscape is developing, some documents on the course's preliminary syllabus are less than a few weeks old, including the Direct Marketing Association's Anti-Spam Working Strategy and the House's Reduction in Distribution of Spam Act of 2003.

Paul Festa writes for News.com