Well, I finally finished up my syllabus, including class topics and reading list, and it has been approved by the program director.

So that’s the good news. Now I have to move forward with lecture notes/Powerpoint slides for each class, which will take quite a bit of time.

Class starts the second week of October.

Thanks for the feedback, which I received from several readers. Note that the class is part of a joint law school program between the University of Maryland Law School and the Central University of Finance and Economics (CUFE) in Beijing. I’m hoping to play off CUFE’s econ reputation and introduce some development and growth theory into my FDI and IP law lectures. Understanding growth and development theory goes a long way to figuring out the political context in China for foreign investment, IP and technology laws and their application. And it’s interesting.

As to sources, I am mostly using law review articles from the U.S. Three reasons for this: 1) they are good and have a lot of detail; 2) I am teaching the course from the perspective of the foreign investor/their legal counsel; and 3) it’s simply easier to pull a law review article off the Internet than going through a number of (probably outdated) books.

As I go through class prep, I may comment on certain sources that are particularly helpful for each area. My sources are not exhaustive, however. I needed to make some trade-offs on length and other factors for the sanity of my students.

The other “bad news” is that although I lost out on a lot of blogging time last week due to syllabus work, this week does not look much better. On Wednesday, I am off to Amsterdam/The Hague to give a presentation on China IP law. That will probably keep me offline until next Monday, since WiFi is hard to come by over there unfortunately.