Frontiers in Empirical Patent Law Scholarship
North Carolina Law Review Symposium Issue:
Volume 87
Chairman: Professor Andrew Chin
Location: UNC School of Law - Room 5052
Date: Friday October 24, 2008
Time: 8:45 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Contact: symposium2008@unc.edu
Presenting Sponsor:
Program Sponsors:
Policymakers have urgently called for predictions and prescriptions regarding the effectiveness of the U.S. patent system in promoting 21st-century innovation in an international environment. In many cases, empirical scholarship can go beyond more traditional modes of legal analysis to identify significant problems and to propose concrete, feasible solutions.
The 2008 North Carolina Law Review Symposium will showcase the remarkable diversity of recent quantitative research on the patent system, and the potential for even broader and deeper interdisciplinary engagement on questions of innovation law and policy. Nationally recognized scholars in law, business and economics will be joined, for perhaps the first time in such a setting, by leading research scientists who have brought distinctive data sets, analytical methodologies, and stakeholder perspectives to their own examinations of the patent system. For all who attend, the resulting conversation is likely to be uniquely challenging and rewarding.
The Hon. Jay Plager is Circuit Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Previously, Judge Plager served in the Executive Office of the President as Associate Director of OMB and as Administrator, OIRA, and earlier as Counselor to the Under Secretary, Department of Health and Human Services. Judge Plager was Dean and Professor, Indiana University-Bloomington School of Law, and served on the law faculties at the University of Illinois College of Law and the University of Florida College of Law. Judge Plager was Visiting Scholar, Stanford University Law School, Visiting Fellow, Trinity College, and Visiting Professor, Cambridge University, and Visiting Research Professor of Law, University of Wisconsin. He has taught in the areas of, and is the author of articles and books on, property law, environmental law, administrative law, and, most recently, intellectual property and patent law.
Scott A. Baker is a Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He clerked for Judge E. Grady Jolly of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Professor Baker's research interests lie at the intersection of law, economics, and game theory. He teaches law and economics, corporate finance, contracts, torts, property, and intellectual property.
Mark Calcagno is a Senior Information Scientist, Product Innovation Capability, for Procter & Gamble. He received a B.S. in Chemistry from St. Bonaventure University in 1970, a M.S. in Organic Chemistry from Bucknell University (under Harold W. Heine) in 1973, and Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry (under Edward E. Schweizer) from the University of Delaware in 1978. From 1978-1979 he was a Robert Welch Foundation Post Doctoral Fellow (under Robert Lyle) at North Texas State University.
Martin Campbell-Kelly is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Warwick, where he specializes in the history of computing. His publications include Computer: A History of the Information Machine; From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry; and ICL: A Business and Technical History.
Colleen Chien joined the Santa Clara University Law School faculty as an Assistant Professor of Law in the fall of 2007. Prior to her appointment, she was an associate, then Special Counsel, at Fenwick & West LLP in San Francisco, California, and a Fellow at the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford Law School. She also served as an adviser to the School of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and worked as a spacecraft engineer at NASA/Jet Propulsion Lab. She worked as an investigative journalist at the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism as a Fulbright Scholar in 1997.
Andrew Chin is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he teaches intellectual property and antitrust law. He earned a J.D. from Yale Law School, clerked for Judge Henry H. Kennedy, Jr. of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, and practiced in the D.C. office of Skadden, Arps. He holds a D.Phil. in computer science from Oxford University and has published articles in many areas involving the intersection of law and computer science.
John Martin Conley is the William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Conley received his J.D. (1977) and a Ph.D. in anthropology (1980) from Duke University. He was editor in chief of the Duke Law Journal and was elected to The Order of the Coif. His principal research and teaching interests have been in law and social science, and intellectual property law.
Christopher A. Cotropia is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Richmond where he is a member of the School's Intellectual Property Institute. He clerked for the Hon. Alvin A. Schall of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Professor Cotropia has published multiple articles on patent claim interpretation, the nonobviousness requirement in patent law, and the empirical analysis of patent case law.
Jay P. Kesan serves as Director for the Program in Intellectual Property & Technology Law, Mildred Van Voorhis Jones Faculty Scholar, and Professor of Law at the University of Illinois. He has received numerous, multi-year, research grants for his work in the areas of intellectual property and technology regulation from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Net Institute, the Coleman Foundation, and the University of Illinois Campus Research Board.
Mark Lemley is the William H. Neukom Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, the Director of the Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology, and the Director of Stanford's LLM Program in Law, Science and Technology. He teaches intellectual property, computer and Internet law, patent law, and antitrust. He is of counsel to the law firm of Keker & Van Nest, where he litigates in the areas of antitrust, intellectual property and computer law.
Xin Li is a doctoral student at the University of Arizona, Department of Management Information Systems. He received his B.E. in Automation in 2000 and his M.E. in Control Theory and Control Engineering in 2003 from Tsinghua University, Beijing. His research interests include Data Mining, Machine Learning, Graph-based Learning, Bioinfomatics, Patent Analysis, and Knowledge Management.
Glynn S. Lunney, Jr. is the McGlinchey Stafford Professor of Law at Tulane University School of Law. While a professor at Tulane Law School, Professor Lunney earned his Ph.D. in Economics from Tulane University in 2006. Today, Professor Lunney's research focuses primarily on economic analysis of, and the economic implications of, patents, copyrights, and trademarks.
Arvind Malhotra is an Associate Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at U.N.C.'s Kenan-Flagler Business School. He received his PhD in business administration and his MS in industrial and systems engineering from the University of Southern California and earned his BE in electronics and communications engineering from the University of Delhi. His areas of expertise include IT-based innovation, knowledge management, virtual teams, inter-organizational information sharing and strategic use of information technology.
Jon F. Merz is Associate Professor in the Department of Medical Ethics in the School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He holds a B.S. in Nuclear Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, an M.B.A. from the University of North Florida, a J.D. from Duquesne University, and a Ph.D in Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Merz's research interests encompass, among other things, the ethics of science, intellectual property, and medical innovation.
Michael Meurer serves as Michaels Faculty Research Scholar and Professor of Law at Boston University. He teaches courses in patents, intellectual property and public policy toward the high-tech industry. Professor Meurer has received several grants and fellowships, including two grants from the Pew Charitable Trust, a Ford Foundation grant, an Olin Faculty Fellowship at Yale Law School and a postdoctoral fellowship at AT&T Bell Labs.
Kristen Osenga is an assistant professor at the University of Richmond School of Law. She writes and teaches about intellectual property law, and specifically patent law. Professor Osenga clerked for the Honorable Richard Linn of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and worked for Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner, practicing in patent litigation and prosecution. She earned her J.D. from the University of Illinois, and also has a B.S.E. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Iowa and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Southern Illinois University.
Arti K. Rai is the Elvin R. Latty Professor of Law at Duke University. She is an expert in patent law, law and the biopharmaceutical industry, and administrative law. Her current research, funded by the National Institutes of Health, focuses on intellectual property issues raised by collaborative R&D in areas ranging from synthetic biology to drug development. Her empirical work on university software patents is funded by the Kauffman Foundation.
Bhaven Sampat, PhD, is an assistant professor at Columbia University. An economist by training, most of Sampat's work is at the intersection of health policy, law, and innovation policy. His current work includes examination of how the NIH allocates its funds across disease areas, empirical analyses of patent quality in the U.S., and evaluation of the impacts of new patent laws on access to medicines in developing countries.
Katherine J. Strandburg is a Professor of Law at DePaul University, where she teaches patent law, cyberlaw, trademark and copyright law, and information privacy law. During the Fall of 2008, she is visiting at Fordham Law School. Her research interests are in patent law, including the empirical study of the patent citation network using statistical physics techniques; science and technology policy; social norm theory and behavioral law and economics; and information privacy law.