When Professor Scott Hemphill clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in 2003–04, he almost never saw an intellectual property case on the Court’s docket. By contrast, several IP arguments were heard during the 2006-07 term.
“It signaled a recognition of the importance of IP in the world in which we live,” he says. “It’s an unusually exciting time to teach and conduct research in the field.” In the knowledge-based global economy of the 21st century, no field is more important than intellectual property.
And it is a very exciting time to study IP law at Columbia, where in the past two years we’ve added three new professors, nearly doubling the size of a group that was already strong. Moreover, it is not just our faculty that makes our program great, but our location in New York City.
“In New York, you realize the effect the law has or doesn’t have on creation,” says Professor Timothy Wu, who joined the faculty from the University of Virginia. A key factor that drew him to Columbia Law School, he says, was its Manhattan location. “Scholars are more useful the closer they are to the facts of the world, and a lot of the IP facts are in New York.”
For students, the city is a kind of laboratory. Only a short subway ride separates us from CEOs of media companies, leading practitioners, and judges presiding over significant court cases. These experts are invited to lecture in classes and at conferences, and our students have opportunities to work with them. This is a type of access few law schools possess, and it affords us a unique position in the legal academy.
The newcomers — Professors Wu, Hemphill, and Clarisa Long — join Jane Ginsburg, Hal Edgar ’67, Michael Heller, Tom Merrill, and Eben Moglen. Among the topics they teach are copyright, patent, trademark, IP regulation, IP theory, and one of our newest offerings in the subject, an introductory elective course for first-year students. Collectively, they belong to an institution whose roots in IP law go back to well before the concept was familiar to most people — to Professor John Kernochan ’48. His 1966-67 seminar looked at the nature and operation of copyright law in the context of recent technological advances (such as the photocopying machine) affecting the exploitation of music, literature, and other art forms.
Things have changed exponentially since Prof. Kernochan’s day. The technological changes we have seen in the past 40 years are simply staggering, and there obviously are many more to come. The future will be filled with delicate and vital issues that will be answered by lawyers like you. I invite you to take a close look at our IP curriculum, or any of the others programs for which we are known, and join us here in Morningside Heights and the laboratory that is New York.
David M. Schizer
Dean and the Lucy G. Moses Professor of Law