Teaching Intellectual Property Law today – testing the relevance of the ‘problem-based learning’ method

How should intellectual property (IP) law be taught today? This is an important question due to the growth of IP as an academic subject over the past decades, reflecting its increasingly interdisciplinary reach and need to deal with novel questions of law. It will be argued that, while always applicable, the skills of interdisciplinarity, creative thinking, ethical awareness, and ability to deal with uncertainty in law, have become even more relevant for current students of IP. This article draws on pedagogical literature from law and other disciplines to argue that problem-based learning (PBL) is theoretically an effective method of teaching that can develop these skills. It concludes with a case study of a PBL session during a Master’s course to identify some of the challenges of PBL in practice and how these can be addressed in the future. This case study contributes to existing literature on PBL in law by focusing on postgraduate study and using a problem drawn from real-life current events.