Academic Commentators & Session Chairs

 

 

Patricia L. Bellia

Associate Professor of Law, Notre Dame University

 

Patricia L. Bellia teaches and researches in the areas of internet law, electronic surveillance law, and constitutional law. Before joining the faculty in 2000, Professor Bellia worked for three years as an attorney-advisor in the Office of Legal Counsel of the United States Department of Justice, advising components of the Justice Department and other executive branch actors on statutory and constitutional matters, including separation-of-powers and high-tech crime issues. She also clerked for Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the Supreme Court of the United States and Judge José A. Cabranes of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Professor Bellia earned her J.D. from the Yale Law School in 1995, where she served as editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal and executive editor of the Yale Journal of International Law, as well as a student director of the Immigration Legal Services Clinic. She earned her A.B. summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1991, where she was elected to membership in Phi Beta Kappa.

 

 

 

Yochai Benkler

Professor of Law, Yale University

 

Yochai Benkler a Professor of Law at Yale Law School. His research focuses on the effects of laws that regulate information production and exchange on the distribution of control over information flows, knowledge, and culture in the digital environment. His particular focus has been on the neglected role of commons-based approaches towards management of resources in the digitally networked environment. He has written about the economics and political theory of rules governing telecommunications infrastructure, with a special emphasis on wireless communications, rules governing private control over information, in particular intellectual property, and of relevant aspects of U.S. constitutional law.

 

 

 

Ruth Okediji

Professor of Law, University of Minnesota

 

Ruth L. Okediji is the William L. Prosser Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School.  She teaches copyright, trademarks, contracts and international intellectual property.  Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Minnesota, Professor Okediji taught at the University of Oklahoma College of Law where she held the Edith Kinney Gaylord Presidential Professorship. Professor Okediji's scholarship focuses primarily on international intellectual property issues with an emphasis on the relationship between multilateral trade law and intellectual property policy.  Her work has addressed the relationship between developing and developed countries in the international intellectual property system, including economic analysis of the bargaining strategies that facilitate harmonization of intellectual property rights. She has written, lectured and published extensively in the area of international intellectual property regulation.  She is co-author of the casebook, “Copyright in a Global Information Economy” (2002). Professor Okediji is the past-Chair of the Section of Law and Computers for the American Association of Law Schools, and past-Chair of the Section on Intellectual Property. She is a member of the New York Bar Association, the American Bar Association and Order of the Coif.  She received her LL.B. in 1989 from the University of Jos, her Masters in Law and Doctorate in Law from Harvard Law School in 1991 and 1996 respectively.

 

 

 

Margaret Radin

Professor of Law, Stanford University

 

Margaret Jane Radin is the William Benjamin Scott and Luna M. Scott Professor of Law at Stanford University. She received her A.B. from Stanford in 1963, where she majored in music, her M.F.A. in Music History from Brandeis University in 1965 as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and became a Ph.D. candidate in music at Berkeley in 1968. She received her J.D. from the University of Southern California in 1976. Prior to joining the Stanford law faculty in 1990, she was Carolyn Craig Franklin Professor of Law at USC. Professor Radin has also taught at UCLA and Harvard as a visiting professor of law. Professor Radin is a well-known property theorist, who has written extensively about "commodification" (exploring the limits of markets and market rhetoric), as well as other aspects of property as a right and as an institution. Her current research and teaching field is intellectual property, information technology, and the jurisprudence of cyberspace. Professor Radin is the author of Contested Commodities (Harvard University Press 1996), Reinterpreting Property (University of Chicago Press 1993), and over thirty articles.

 

 

 

Joel Reidenberg

Professor of Law, Fordham University

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gigi Sohn

President, Public Knowledge

 

Marc Rotenberg is Executive Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in Washington, DC. He teaches information privacy law at Georgetown University Law Center and has testified before Congress on many issues, including access to information, encryption policy, consumer protection, computer security, and communications privacy. He recently testified before the 9-11 Commission on "Security and Liberty: Protecting Privacy, Preventing Terrorism." He has served on several national and international advisory panels, including the expert panels on Cryptography Policy and Computer Security for the OECD, the Legal Experts on Cyberspace Law for UNESCO, and the Countering Spam program of the ITU. He chairs the ABA Committee on Privacy and Information Protection, and is Secretary of the Public Interest Registry. He is editor of "The Privacy Law Sourcebook" and co-editor (with Daniel J. Solove) of "Information Privacy Law" (Aspen Publishing 2003). He is a graduate of Harvard College and Stanford Law School. He served as Counsel to Senator Patrick J. Leahy on the Senate Judiciary Committee after graduation from law school. He is the recipient of several awards, including the World Technology Award in Law.

 

Katherine Strandberg

Professor of Law, DePaul University

 

Katherine Strandburg is assistant professor of law at DePaul University College of Law, where she teaches patent law, cyberlaw, trademark and copyright law, and information privacy law.  Her research interests are in patent law, science and technology policy, internet law, and data privacy law. Since joining the DePaul faculty in 2002 she has published in the Wisconsin and Connecticut Law Reviews.  She was the recipient of the College of Law’s 2004 Award for Outstanding Achievement in Scholarship.  She is co-editor of a forthcoming volume entitled Privacy and Identity:  The Promise and Perils of a Technological Age, which will be based on the DePaul 2004 CIPLIT Symposium, which she organized in collaboration with DePaul’s School of Computer Science, Telecommunications, and Information Systems. Professor Strandburg obtained her law degree from the University of Chicago Law School with high honors in 1995 and served as a law clerk to the Honorable Richard D. Cudahy of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.  She is an experienced litigator and is licensed to practice before
the United States Patent and Trademark Office.  She currently serves on the Amicus Committee of the Federal Circuit Bar Association and is a member of the AAAS Working Group on Developing a Research Exemption to Intellectual Property Protections. Prior to her legal career, Professor Strandburg was a research physicist at Argonne National Laboratory, having received her Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1984.  She was visiting professor of physics at Northwestern University from 1990-1992.

 

 

 

Diane Zimmerman

Professor of Law, New York University

 

Diane Leenheer Zimmerman is Samuel Tilden Professor of Law at New York University School of Law.  She graduated magna cum laude from Beaver College in Pennsylvania, studied English and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Faculty of Columbia University, and spent 10 years as a journalist at Newsweek Magazine and the New York Daily News before attending law school.  Professor Zimmerman received her J.D. with honors from Columbia University in 1976, serving as the Articles and Book Reviews Editor of the Law Review.  After clerking for the Honorable Jack B. Weinstein in the United States District Court, Eastern District of New York, she joined the faculty at New York University, where she currently teaches in the areas of first amendment, intellectual property, privacy and tort law.  Professor Zimmerman is a member of the American Law Institute, and is active in a number of other law-related projects.  She serves on the editorial boards of several scholarly journals, including the Journal of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. and has also been a faculty member at the Aspen Institute.  She is  the former Chair of the American Bar Association's First Amendment Rights Committee, a trustee of the Copyright Society, and has also chaired the Committee on Civil Rights of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York.  She spent two years on leave from N.Y.U. as counsel to the firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom working on products liability, advertising and other issues. Professor Zimmerman served as the Reporter on Gender for the Second Circuit Task Force on Gender, Racial and Ethnic Fairness. She has written extensively on intellectual property, the first amendment, and  women's rights. She is the co-editor of a recent book published by Oxford University Press entitled “Expanding the Bounds of Intellectual Property” and lectures frequently in the United States and abroad on copyright, libel, privacy, commercial speech, the regulation of pornography, gender equity and other issues. Honors include delivery of the 17^th annual Horace S. Manges Lecture on copyright at Columbia in 2004, and the award of the Distinguished Lee Visiting Professorship at the College of William & Mary.  Professor Zimmerman also served as the inaugural Hosier Distinguished Visiting Professor in Intellectual Property at DePaul University College of Law.