Student Engagement

Opportunities to Engage with CTIC

Detkin Intellectual Property & Technology Legal Clinic The Detkin Clinic, headed by Prof. Cynthia Dahl, is unique among IP clinics nationwide in that it assumes a sizeable percentage of work from the Penn Center for Innovation (PCI), the University of Pennsylvania’s technology transfer office. Students counsel Penn start-up companies and Penn laboratories with early-stage discoveries, helping them to analyze their legal and business options and choose their best path to commercialization. The Detkin Clinic seminar also provides opportunities for law students to work with students from other schools at Penn who represent the types of professionals they will meet in practice, especially in business, technology, science, and the arts. Through simulations, shared classes, and even shared clients, the students learn from and among their professional peers.
Partners of Entrepreneurial Engineering and Penn Carey Law (PEEPL) PEEPL is a student-run legal counseling simulation supervised by CTIC’s Prof. Cynthia Dahl. PEEPL pairs law students with teams of engineering students enrolled in the engineering entrepreneurship class at Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science. Teams choose a real-world technology to develop into a simulated business, which they pitch to a panel of venture capitalists as a course capstone. The law students counsel the engineering teams during the semester, answering questions about protectability, licensing, and infringement of the technology. The goal of the partnership is to equip both future engineers and attorneys with the skills they need to communicate effectively in an increasingly interdisciplinary professional environment and to teach the teams to consider legal advice within business realities.
Moot Courts Prof. Polk Wagner has brought several winning teams to the American Intellectual Property Law Association’s Giles S. Rich National Patent Law Moot Court competition, and Prof. Cynthia Dahl has developed winning teams for the IP LawMeet, a national transactional IP moot court.
Keiretsu Forum Students can apply for an internship with a biomedical research institute.
Law Without Walls Law students are paired with engineering and business students to solve legal technology problems. Additionally, students from these disciplines have the ability to compete in an international transactional contest.

Journal of Law & Innovation CTIC created the faculty-run Journal of Law & Innovation to focus on law and technology. During the fall semester, students work with faculty editors and read prominent legal scholarship on that year’s Journal topic. During the spring, students help organize and execute a major symposium on the topic, work with the symposium authors to substantively edit their pieces, and assist with the Journal’s publication before the end of the academic year.
Penn Intellectual Property Group (PIPG) CTIC is pleased to enjoy a highly collaborative relationship with the PIPG, a student group established during the fall of 2001. PIPG focuses on creating and supporting interest in intellectual property and technology law at Penn Carey Law, Penn, and the broader Philadelphia community. PIPG continues to expand its efforts and programming, which include career panels, academic symposia, and social events.
Penn Carey Law STEM Club Penn Carey Law’s STEM Club is focused on providing a space for science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) majors and STEM-adjacent majors to adapt to the unique challenges that accompany adjusting to law school and the legal profession. The goal of this community of scientists is to connect incoming Penn Carey Law students with current students who share similar academic backgrounds to help them successfully navigate 1L, find summer internships, and prepare for a legal career that capitalizes on individual’s technical abilities.
Penn Carey Law Antitrust Association (PLAA) Founded in 2021, PLAA provides a forum for students to research, analyze, and discuss antitrust-related matters through guest speakers, panels, and academic activities. The association explores such topics as merger control, cartel and unilateral conducts investigations, interface between antitrust and other regulated areas, and hot topics, including those related to digital markets. PLAA provides opportunities for members to network with professionals, scholars, and other students involved in the antitrust field, both at national and international level.

Student Fellowships Every semester, CTIC selects a handful of talented Penn Carey Law students to assist CTIC faculty with their research and to help the Center in various ways. Students may do their fellowship for credit or for pay.
Summer Public Interest Fellowships The CTIC Summer Public Interest Fellowship provides funding for students who secure internships with public interest or government organizations that are doing work relevant to technology policy, intellectual property, cyber law, privacy, and related fields. These fellowships are open to Penn Carey Law 1Ls and 2Ls and offer students the opportunity to gain experience in technology law that might not otherwise be available to them.

Joint Degree Program in Law & Engineering In partnership with Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS), Penn Carey Law offers joint-degree programs in law and technology: the JD/Master of Computing and Information Technology (MCIT), which requires no engineering or computer science background, and the JD/Master of Science in Engineering (MSE), which is intended for students with strong undergraduate backgrounds in engineering or computer science. CTIC offers scholarship opportunities to JD students pursuing joint degrees in law and technology.

Massive Open Online Courses: Intellectual Property Specialization (MOOCs) Penn Carey Law offers eight Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Four of the eight classes are part of the Intellectual Property Law Specialization. Through these courses, students learn the differences among the various forms of intellectual property rights, including patents, copyrights, and trademarks, and their various applications to human innovations. Drawing from that knowledge, students work to develop a trademark strategy for a company, analyze a patent document, and address a copyright cease-and-desist request, for example. These hands-on projects give students the necessary framework to craft integrated intellectual property strategies tailored to an organization’s core business goals.

CTIC continues to develop relationships with commercial and non-profit organizations to offer summer and term-time internship opportunities to Penn Carey Law students who are interested in careers in law and technology. We will post information on current internship opportunities, including application instructions and deadlines, here.

Past internships have been offered by: