Lisa Ouellette

Lisa Larrimore Ouellette is the Deane F. Johnson Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. Her research focuses on intellectual property law and innovation policy. She leverages her training in physics to explore policy issues such as how scientific expertise might improve patent examination, the value of information disclosed in patents, patenting publicly funded research under the Bayh–Dole Act, equity in patent inventorship, and the integration of IP with other levers of innovation policy. She has applied these ideas to biomedical innovation challenges including the opioid epidemic, COVID-19, vaccines, and pharmaceutical prices. She has also written about doctrinal puzzles in patent and trademark law, the effect of AI on patent practice, and the potential for different standards of review to create “deference mistakes” in numerous areas of law.

Professor Ouellette is an acclaimed teacher and nationally recognized intellectual property law expert. She coauthored a free patent law casebook, Patent Law: Cases, Problems, and Materials, which has been adopted at over 70 law schools, and she has designed and led pedagogy training for other Stanford Law faculty. In 2018, she received Stanford’s John Bingham Hurlbut Award for Excellence in Teaching. Her commentary has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, TIME Magazine, and Slate. She was also appointed to a committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to recommend strategies for better aligning medical innovation with disease burden and unmet needs.

Prior to her appointment at Stanford Law School in 2014, Professor Ouellette was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. She clerked for Judge Timothy B. Dyk of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and Judge John M. Walker, Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. She holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, where she was an Articles Editor of the Yale Law Journal. She earned a Ph.D. in physics from Cornell University and a B.A. in physics from Swarthmore College, and has conducted scientific research at the Max Planck Institute, CERN, and NIST.