Prerequisites: None

Exam Type: No Exam

This experiential course is taught by Nana Sarian, who has served as General Counsel of Stella McCartney since 2012, and Rebecca Harris, an HLS alum and an attorney at Goulston & Storrs in Boston whose practice focuses on various areas of Fashion Law.

The course will consist of interactive workshops featuring case studies on fashion law. Students will put themselves in the shoes of a lawyer advising a brand, working in small groups to tackle real legal challenges and scenarios faced by in-house fashion counsels on a daily basis from the office and atelier to the runway, with a particular focus on legal analysis and problem solving. Topics will range from intellectual property (including the protection of fashion designs, focusing on the differences between protection in the US and EU), commercial law (including commercial arrangements to license the IP of a brand to third parties for the manufacture and sale of products which traditionally are not produced in-house by a brand, e.g. fragrance or sportswear), contracts for sale (to wholesale and retail customers) as well as the laws relevant to fashion shows/presentations (covering matters as broad as design rights, music licensing, fashion photographers and labor law), supply chains (with a focus on sustainability in fashion), the digital world and social media. Various international guest lecturers from the fashion industry will also be invited to present in class including from Parsons School of Design, as well as Pier Luigi Roncaglia (an IP practitioner based in Italy who specializes in civil litigation in all areas of IP before all Italian courts, the General Court and the Court of Justice of the European Union as well as criminal litigation and anti-counterfeiting) and Claire Bergkamp (Head of Sustainability and Ethical Trade, Stella McCartney).

Nana Sarian developed the Fashion Law Lab and has been teaching the course at HLS since 2017. Rebecca Harris has been part of the teaching team since the course commenced and returns this year as a Co-Lecturer.