The University of Maryland, Baltimore’s Francis King Carey School of Law announced last month that it will be adding two new specializations to its Master of Science in Law program: cybersecurity and patent law.
The Master of Science in Law is a new program set to launch this fall that already includes specializations in crisis management, environmental law and health care law, which were announced last fall.
Designed for part-time students, the program targets working professionals looking to acquire a specialized understanding of law’s relationship to their fields of study, said Jose Bahamonde-Gonzalez, associate dean for professional education.
“We wanted to know if there was a market for this kind of program where a student would obtain a good level of legal academic knowledge in various areas,” he said.
The idea for the cybersecurity degree specialization came as the curriculum for the crisis management specialization was being developed, said Michael Greenberger, director of the Center for Health and Homeland Security. Cybersecurity emerged as a much a more complicated issue among other types of crisis management.
“The importance of cyber just became so predominant that we felt we should make the track in and of itself,” he said. “There is a huge demand for understanding laws, regulations, best practices and operating procedures that cover this area.”
The Master of Science in Law cybersecurity specialization, as opposed to most graduate-level cybersecurity programs, will not be as technical and will focus mainly on law and policy within the field.
“Just understanding technically how to prevent hacking or how to use it affirmatively as a weapon does not take you far enough in being able to give guidance to whoever you are working with or for,” Greenberger said.
The patent law specialization intends to provide training to engineers, software developers and inventors in becoming patent agents.
Patricia Campbell, director of the Maryland Intellectual Property Legal Resource Center, oversees the patent law track and said professionals in the technical industry and the sciences might have an economic interest in understanding patents and other forms of intellectual property.
“As opposed to going to law school for three years, it seems like it would be much more attractive to someone who has just finished a master’s degree or even a Ph.D. and is interested in getting some training in the area of patent law,” she said.
In the first semester, all students in every specialization will take background classes about the legal system, Campbell said. The patent-related courses will cover areas about intellectual property such as copyrights and trade secrets.
In the second semester of the second year of the program, students must complete a three-credit faculty-supervised capstone project.
“The capstone project will give the master’s students experience in practical problem solving with a real life problem,” Greenberger said.
The program will be a two-year, 30-credit master’s program that will accept about 30 students in each track. The law school is currently accepting applications until April 15, and the classes will be taught at this university’s campus.
