Nika Updates

This has been a busy week with trying to decide on classes. But I have a few quick updates/stories.

On Tuesday afternoon, the seven Darwin LL.M.s (all of us live in the Malting House) got invited to tea with our Law Advisor at Darwin -- who is actually associated with Newnham. We don't have our own in-house one. She focuses on intellectual property, and is one of several lecturers who I will have for my International IP paper. (All the "papers" (classes) here have multiple lecturers associated with them who will lecture on their areas of expertise during certain segments of the year.) So she'll be doing international copyright for me in the Spring. My favorite part of that was when she asked us what we were having trouble adjusting to, and one of the Europeans said that the English people ate too early and too fast. For me, they eat way too late and agonizingly slow.

On Wednesday, I had my International IP paper, and also sat in on the International Environmental Law one (which I don't think I'm going to take). International IP is working out perfectly for me because we're doing copyright and patent from an international perspective, but are being taught trademark from a comparative perspective between U.S. and EU/UK law (they're harmonized now). The reason that works well is because although I've studied U.S. patent and copyright law, I haven't formally studied U.S. trademark law -- so this will be an opportunity for me to learn that, along with everything else. The lecturer for that segment of the course is a U.S. trademark expert from Columbia.

Then I went to Mile End on Wednesday, which was basically as expected, plus a little boondoggle added on at the end. My car's driver was the roommate of another car's driver, and driver #2 didn't have a bed in their new apartment, but had bought one on eBay or CL or something. So we had to find the apartment in London, get the bed, attach it to the car, get out of London, and then take the A-road rather than the M-road back to Cambridge. Left gym: 9:30pm. Arrived in Cambridge: 1:30am. Boondoggle.

Today has also been kind of busy. I had Family Law in the morning, which I'm planning on taking as my fourth paper. That was interesting because the lecturer for this portion of the course wanted more legal recognition for biological parents in a lot of contexts than pretty much any of us students wanted. Also, comparative thing I learned: In the UK, surrogate mothers have many more legal rights than surrogate mothers in the US. But I'm a little unclear on whether that applies to all UK surrogate mothers, or only ones who are also acting as egg donors.

Then I had IP in the afternoon, where we were focusing on trade secrets. Except UK trade secret law is actually very heavily linked to some publicity/privacy rights, since it all seems to fall under a "breach of confidence" umbrella here. So the cases we actually were looking at were less traditional trade secret cases and more cases of celebrities suing tabloids. Which was interesting. Next week, like half the class is on normal trade secrets in the context of employees and the other half is on celebrities again.

I also went to pilates in the afternoon, which was kind of disappointing because even though it was half an hour longer than my pilates at home, it was much more basic and way easier. The teacher said that it should get more challenging as the term progresses, but I don't have super high hopes for it getting up to what I was doing at home.

Final update: I got my PIN number for my bank card in the mail today, but no card itself. The bank initially said the card would be here by Friday, and the letter in the mail said the card should arrive within seven days. However, I'm highly skeptical because other international students setting up their Barclays accounts weeks ago are still waiting on their cards. And the saga continues...