2021 Intellectual Property Colloquium 

The IP Colloquium explores doctrinal, theoretical, and policy issues in intellectual property law. Its primary aim is to provide students with an opportunity to hone their critical and analytical skills through deep engagement with leading legal scholarship in IP.

This year’s Colloquium is focusing on the interaction of IP law and issues of racial, gender, economic, and social justice.

The Colloquium exposes students to a broad array of interdisciplinary scholarship across the various branches of this expansive and increasingly important area of law, and it requires them to engage in both written and oral analysis and critique of that scholarship. The Colloquium centers on biweekly presentations by outside scholars who are nationally and internationally recognized in their fields. This year the presentations will occur virtually.

This year’s speakers are:

Deborah R. Gerhardt | February 8, 2021

“An Empirical Study of Gender and Race in Trademark Prosecution”

Deborah R. Gerhardt joined the UNC law faculty in 2009 and serves as the Reef C. Ivey II Excellence Fund Term Professor of Law. She specializes in intellectual property law, with a particular focus on the intersection of law and creativity. Gerhardt teaches Arts Entrepreneurship, Art Law, Copyright Law,Trademark Law and Contracts. In 2018, Gerhardt was awarded UNC’s Distinguished Teaching Award for Post-Baccalaureate Instruction. She has written many influential essays and articles on copyright, trademark and law and entrepreneurship. Her work has appeared in the Notre Dame Law Review, the Journal of the Copyright Society and Slate.

Prior to joining the faculty at UNC, Gerhardt clerked for the Honorable Judge John M. Manos in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio and practiced in the intellectual property section at Jones Day Reavis & Pogue in Cleveland, Ohio. She earned her A.B. degree from Duke University and her J.D. degree cum laude from Case Western Reserve School of Law where she was the Executive Notes Editor of the Law Review.

W. Keith Robinson | February 22, 2021

"Artificial Intelligence and Access to the Patent System"

Professor Robinson teaches and writes in the areas of property, intellectual property, patent law and technology law at the SMU Dedman School of Law. His current research focuses on the impact of judicial decisions and administrative patent policy on emerging technology. Thomson Reuters has twice recognized Professor Robinson’s articles on patent infringement, originally published in the American University Law Review and the Texas Intellectual Property Law Journal, as the best in intellectual property law.  He has written and lectured on patent lawsuit avoidance, the patenting of business methods, divided infringement and patent challenges facing emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence.

Professor Robinson practiced law at Foley and Lardner LLP as a member of the electronics practice group in Washington, D.C.  He assisted clients in various areas of patent law including counseling through negotiations, opinions, prosecution and strategic IP issues including evaluating emerging technology.

Professor Robinson has counseled clients in a variety of technical areas including computer software, consumer electronics, display technology, signal processing, telecommunications, wireless communications, network architecture, application specific electronic devices, semiconductor devices and manufacturing, data mining, search technology, vehicle safety systems, RFID technology, Internet applications and business methods.

Before practicing law, Professor Robinson was a technology consultant for Ernst & Young LLP and Cap Gemini Ernst & Young LLC. He counseled clients on software development processes, developed customized software solutions and designed and implemented web application architectures.

Professor Robinson is a graduate of Duke University School of Law (J.D., cum laude, 2004). He holds a degree in electrical engineering from the Duke University Pratt School of Engineering (B.S. 1999). While attending law school, Professor Robinson served in the Duke Law Community Enterprise Clinic, where he provided counseling on copyright and trademark protection and advised entrepreneurial clients on business formation.

Professor Robinson is admitted to practice in the District of Columbia, Virginia, and before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Colleen V. Chien | March 15, 2021

“Diversity in Innovation and Inventing”

Colleen Chien is Professor at Santa Clara University School of Law where she teaches, mentors students, and conducts empirical research on innovation, intellectual property, and the criminal justice system. From 2013-2015 she served in the Obama White House as the Senior Advisor on Intellectual Property and Innovation, working on a broad range of patent, copyright, technology transfer, open innovation, and other issues. Professor Chien is nationally known for her research and publications on domestic and international patent law and policy issues. She has testified on multiple occasions before Congress, the DOJ, the FTC, and the US Patent and Trademark Office on patent issues, frequently lectures at national law conferences, and has published several in-depth empirical studies, including of patent litigation and patent-assertion entities (PAEs). In the realm of criminal justice, she is founder of the Paper Prisons initiative (paperprisons.org) a research initiative that which works to document and narrow the second chance gap between those eligible for and receiving second chances (through early release, records clearing and re-infranchisement).

Professor Chien’s work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, NPR’s Marketplace, and numerous other venues and she is among the top 20-cited intellectual property and cyberlaw scholars in the US. Prior to entering academia, Professor Chien did stints as an investigative journalist, strategy consultant, and practicing lawyer (as an associate, then special counsel at Fenwick & West LLP in San Francisco). Professor Chien is a recipient of the American Law Institute’s Early Career Medal; the Intellectual Property Vanguard Award and the Eric Yamamoto Emerging Scholar award. She has been named a Tech Law Trailblazer (for her work founding “the Second Chances and Empathy Hackathon”), one of Silicon Valley’s “Women of Influence,” and one of the 50 Most Influential People in Intellectual Property in the world. She is the founder of several civic engagement projects, a Faculty Scholar of the Markkula Center for Ethics. Professor Chien graduated from Stanford (Engineering) and Berkeley Law Schools and is a proud Oakland resident along with her husband, their two sons, and pet rabbit.

Anjali Vats | March 29, 2021

“Temporality in a Time of Tam, or Towards a Chronopolitics of Intellectual Property Law”

Anjali Vats is Associate Professor of Communication and African and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College and Associate Professor of Law at Boston College Law School (by courtesy). She is interested in issues related to race, law, communication, and popular culture, with particular focus on intellectual property. Her book, The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race and the Making of Americans (Stanford University Press, 2020), examines the relationship between copyright, patent, and trademark law, race, and national identity formation. Vats has published in journals and law reviews, including the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Communication, Culture & Critique, and the Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal. In 2016-2017, as an AAUW Postdoctoral Fellow, Vats taught at UC Davis School of Law. She was previously a faculty member in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, where she was affiliated with the Center for Intellectual Property Research at the Maurer School of Law. Before becoming a professor, Vats served as law clerk to the now retired Chief Justice A. William Maupin of the Supreme Court of Nevada.

J. Janewa Osei-Tutu | April 12, 2021

“Branding Commercial and Cultural Identities”

Professor Osei-Tutu, of FIU College of Law, holds an LL.M., with distinction, in International and Comparative Law from McGill University, one of the premier academic institutions in Canada. She wrote her graduate thesis on trade-related intellectual property as it relates to developing countries, and continues to write in this area. Drawing on her academic and practical experiences, Professor Osei-Tutu’s scholarship focuses on the relationship between trade-related intellectual property, human development, human rights, and culture.

She joined academia after several years of intellectual property (IP) practice as Legal Counsel to the Patent & Trademark Office, and the IP Policy Directorate at Industry Canada (USPTO equivalent). In that capacity, Osei-Tutu advised the Canadian government on the IP aspects of certain trade negotiations, as well as IP submissions to international organizations, such as the WIPO and the WTO. In addition, she advised on complex litigation and legislative reform of Canada’s IP laws. Osei-Tutu’s legal experience includes commercial law practice with leading law firms in Canada and Ghana. She also clerked as an Associate Legal Officer for Trial Chamber II at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Tanzania. OseiTutu is a member of the bar in New York and Ontario (inactive).

Professor Osei-Tutu was a founding co-Chair of the Junior Intellectual Property Scholars Association (JIPSA), and is an active volunteer with Broward county public schools. She is the current Editor in Chief of the African Journal of Legal Studies, and one of the founding directors of the Center for International Law and Policy in Africa.

Andrew Gilden | April 26, 2021

“Endorsing After Death”

Professor Gilden teaches property, internet, and copyright law as well as trusts & estates. His research focuses on intellectual property and internet law, as well as legal issues concerning free speech, civil rights, gender identity and sexual orientation. 

Before joining Willamette University College of Law, Gilden was a Thomas C. Grey Fellow and Lecturer of Law at Stanford University where he taught social media law, intellectual property counseling, federal litigation and legal research and writing. He worked as an associate in the New York office of Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, his practice focused primarily on intellectual property and media litigation. He clerked for the Hon. Cynthia Holcomb Hall of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and the Hon. Marilyn Hall Patel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.