Legality and Institutions in Intellectual Property Laws
Conversations about global intellectual property laws today invariably focus almost exclusively on the substantive content of their various legal rules. For instance, commentators analyze how a domestic intellectual property rule varies from its counterpart in another jurisdiction or whether it is in line with a relevant international treaty. This focus, however, routinely ignores the manner in which a jurisdiction’s conception of legality, manifested through its arrangements of lawmaking and enforcement, shape the nature, scope and normative goals of intellectual property. To optimally understand and advance global intellectual property laws, we argue the case for a more direct, dynamic engagement with institutional questions and considerations of legality, drawing on examples from the intellectual property systems of the U.S., China, and India.
This event is a part of Columbia Academy on Law in Global Affairs (CALGA), a series of online open-access events, in which Columbia Law School faculty present their research and debate current issues with colleagues from around the globe.
CALGA is cosponsored by Columbia Law School, the Parker School of Foreign and Comparative Law, The Committee on Global Thought, and Columbia | Global Centers.
About the Speakers
Shyam Balganesh writes and teaches in the areas of copyright law, intellectual property, and legal theory. He has written extensively on understanding how intellectual property and innovation policy can benefit from the use of ideas, concepts, and structures from different areas of the common law, especially private law. His recent work explores the interaction between copyright law and key institutional features of the American legal system. He is also working on a series of articles advancing an account of “legal internalism” that explains the shape and trajectory of legal thinking. Balganesh’s work has appeared in leading law journals, including the Columbia Law Review, Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and Yale Law Journal. He is also a co-author of sections of the leading copyright law treatise Nimmer on Copyright.
Before joining the Columbia Law School faculty in 2021, Balganesh was a professor of law and co-director of the Center for Technology, Innovation and Competition at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. Prior to that, he was a Bigelow Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School. He received a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was an articles and essays editor of the Yale Law Journal and a student fellow at the Information Society Project. Prior to that, he spent two years as a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford, where he received a B.C.L. and M.Phil.
In 2017, he was elected a member of the American Law Institute, and since 2015 he has served as an adviser to the Restatement of the Law, Copyright. Balganesh also has been recognized for his teaching: In 2017, he received the Robert A. Gorman Award for Excellence in Teaching and, in 2015, the A. Leo Levin Award for Excellence in an Introductory Course, both at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
Haochen Sun is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law. He previously served as Director of the Law and Technology Center and the LLM Program in in Technology and Intellectual Property Law at the Faculty of Law. He specializes in intellectual property, technology law, and Chinese law. His recent scholarship has focused on the theoretical and policy foundations of intellectual property, Chinese intellectual property law, and technology law and the public interest. He has won a number of research output prizes and major research grants for projects dealing with intellectual property protection of luxury goods and trademark law reform in China.
Haochen’s monograph Technology and the Public Interest will be published by Cambridge University Press in spring 2022. He co-edited The Luxury Economy and Intellectual Property (Oxford University Press, 2015) and The Cambridge Handbook of Copyright Limitations and Exceptions in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Currently, he is co-editing Charting Limitations on Trademark Rights (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2022) with Professor Barton Beebe, and Data Sovereignty on the Digital Silk Road (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2022) with Professor Anupam Chander.
Haochen has organized many international conferences on intellectual property and technology law, and has delivered public lectures at many leading law schools in Asia, Europe, and North America. Moreover, he has taught intellectual property courses at the University of California Davis School of Law and the University of North Carolina School of Law as a Visiting Professor.
In addition, Haochen has advised leading law firms and companies in the entertainment, information technology, and luxury and fashion sectors on matters relating to intellectual property protection. His opinions about intellectual property and technology law have appeared in media outlets, such as BBC News, Forbes, Lianhe Zaobao, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, South China Morning Post, Ming Pao, The Wall Street Journal, Shenzhen Satellite TV, and Radio Television Hong Kong.