I Create and Give a Whole New ‘Information and Law’ Course in January
Was UQAM so desperate that it finally came to offer me this course? Because if I am indeed a jurist by training, I still remain a non-practicing and non-believing one. Enough joking. I accepted to create and teach a course officially entitled Droit de l’information (Information Law), never offered before. This course is part of the LLB program, but is offered to students in all programs. Indeed, currently 12% of students enrolled are from Communications.
I suggested – and it was agreed – that the scope of the course be expanded into a sort of ‘Information & Law’ course, almost and ‘Information Society and Law’ one. So rather than covering one by one, some special legal institutions (intellectual property, access to information, freedom of press and libel, privacy and others), I propose instead to explore:
- all of legal realities through the perspective of information and of an information society, and conversely,
- the realities of information and of information society as they are regulated by laws, norms and standards of all kinds.
I have yet to produce a detailed course outline. However, at the time I am writing this, the first objective would be to get students to acquire certain knowledge and skills to work in an information society, including:
- detect the presence of information in any considered human activity;
- reconstruct how the information is handled, who are those involved, what types of relationships (including legal) develop between whom through such information handling;
- identify the relevant legal institutions and the different sources of norms potentially applicable to a particular information handling;
- raise the social and ethical issues of this handling;
- detect the informational dimension in any legal document (law, contract, court, legal communication, norm or standard);
- communicate about the legal dimension of handling information, including lay citizens and users.
Students in law will be especially encouraged to develop the ability to legally qualify a human activity involving the handling of information.
Rather than switch from one field law to another, the course’s plan will rather follow, week after week, the consecutive life cycle stages of information from its initial creation to various uses, including personal decision making.
This course will also insist on:
- basic knowledge in information science and management, linguistics and related fields, and
- methods to properly document information practices.
The course will be held on Monday evenings from January 10, 2011. There is still room for students. I therefore make this a formal invitation. Welcome to all!
Français
English
Twitter
Identi.ca
Google Plus
unless stated otherwise
