AALS Biolaw Section

I thought I would share with the wider Biolaw community an initiative that several of us are taking at the American Association of Law Schools ("AALS"): to have "Biolaw" officially recognized as a "Section", like Intellectual Property and Cyberlaw. Here is the e-mail invitation we sent law professors attending the annual AALS meetings in San Diego:

Biolaw Folks,

June Carbone, Chris Holman, and I have organized a "Biolaw" panel at this year's annual AALS meetings that we hope you will all attend. It will take place on Wednesday, January 7th, from 3:20-4:20 in Laguna, South Tower/Level 1, San Diego Marriott Hotel & Marina.. The panel is entitled The Two Halves of Biolaw (Behavioral Biology and the Law of Biological Innovation), and will feature Dan Burk, Oliver Goodenough, Mark Janis, and Mark Lemley. In addition to our distinguished panel, we will be soliciting signatures from attendees to form an official "Biolaw" section at AALS. The panel is taking place as part of the Socioeconomics program, and June, Chris, and I would like to thank Socioeconomics' support in helping our fledgling attempt to gain AALS section status for Biolaw.

We have also organized an open program on Biolaw that will take place on Friday, January 9th, from 1:30-3:15 in Del Mar, South Tower/Level 3, San Diego Marriott Hotel & Marina. During the open program, we will discuss the creation and organization of the "Biolaw" section.

We believe that biolaw's rapid growth as a field warrants AALS sectionhood. June, Hank Greely, Mark Lemley, Dan Burk, Oliver Goodenough, Mark Janis, and many more of you have long cultivated biolaw as a field, and these efforts have led to much recent activity. For three years now Jim Chen and I have been running the Biolaw: Law and the Life Sciences blog (www.biolaw.blogspot.com) and I've been running the Biolaw listserv (please let me know if you'd like to join). Last year the University of Louisville School of Law held its first biolaw conference, Law and the Life Sciences, and the University of Kansas School of Law just held its second annual Biolaw Conference, Biolaw: Law at the Frontiers of Biology (taped for broadcast on NPR), several weeks ago. In addition, Chris cofounded the IPBiotech listserv, and then founded Holman's Biotech IP Blog (http://holmansbiotechipblog.blogspot.com/). Along with the many contributions you have already made to biolaw, we hope you will support our AALS sectionhood petition.

We hope you are able to attend one or both of these Biolaw events. Thanks for your help moving biolaw forward.

Thank you very much,
June, Chris, and Andrew

Dr. Andrew W. Torrance
Associate Professor of Law
Research Associate, Biodiversity Institute
University of Kansas
torrance@ku.edu
http://www.law.ku.edu/faculty/faculty/torrance.shtml

Wish us luck!