Working with clients selected by the instructor, teams of students prepare a complete information campaign from intitial pitch to final presentation. A large part of the evaluation of this course is conducted by a panel of local PR and advertising professionals. This course is designed to explain the underpinnings of the First Amendment and then apply those legal foundations to issues that affect professional communicators. The class considers free speech, access to public records and meetings, commercial speech, libel and privacy, obscenity, and copyright, trademark and patent. At each step, the ethical implications of the legal issues are discussed in-depth and strategies for making ethical decisions are discovered and dissected.
Students also learn how the court system works, and conduct legal research.
This is the capstone course of the four-year program at Russell Sage College. It is designed to give students advanced information about communications. Communicating in the 21st Century. This is a required course for all Communications majors, and is normally taken the final semester of the senior year.