Participant Biographical Statements
Updated 2/18/09
Lisa Alexander is an Assistant Professor of Law at
the University of Wisconsin Law School. She joined the faculty in
Fall 2006. A native New Yorker, Professor Alexander focuses her
scholarly interests on the study of transactional legal strategies
to foster equitable urban community development that minimizes
displacement, mitigates poverty, and promotes racial and social
justice. Professor Alexander teaches Contracts, Business
Organizations, and Community Economic Development Law. Professor
Alexander graduated from Columbia Law School and Wesleyan
University. Professor Alexander practiced in the Chicago Office of
Miner, Barnhill & Galland, P.C., where she focused on community
economic development, non-profit organizations, affordable and fair
housing, and residential and commercial real estate. She was also
awarded a competitive Equal Justice Works Fellowship (formerly
NAPIL), and with it, worked as a staff attorney at the Chicago
Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Inc. Professor
Alexander’s scholarly work includes: A Sociolegal History of
Public Housing Reform in Chicago, 17 J. Aff. Hous. & Comm. Dev.
L. 155 (Fall 2007/Winter 2008), Stakeholder Participation in New
Governance: Lessons From Chicago's Public Housing Reform
Experiment, 16 Geo. J. on Poverty L. & Pol’y (forthcoming)
(2009), and Predatory Private Equity and Affordable Housing: Legal
Solutions to Stem the Gentrification of the Birthplaces of Hip-Hop
(work in progress). Professor Alexander is affiliated with the UW
Center on Community Economic Development and is a former Associate
Editor of the Journal of Affordable Housing & Community
Development Law, a quarterly legal publication of the American Bar
Association.
Olufunmilayo (Funmi) Arewa is Associate Professor of Law
at Northwestern University School of Law. Prior to this she was an
assistant professor and assistant director of the Center for Law,
Technology, and the Arts at Case School of Law in Cleveland, Ohio.
Her areas of expertise include intellectual property, international
trade and business, business law, entrepreneurship, empirical
methods, and finance. Professor Arewa was previously the chief
financial officer and general counsel at Boston-based JT Venture
Partners, LLC. She has written several articles and presented on
issues relating to copyright infringements, securities regulations,
and global intellectual property. Professor Arewa holds the
following degrees: AB and JD, Harvard University; MA and PhD,
University of California, Berkeley; AM, University of Michigan.
Megan M. Carpenter is Associate Professor of Law
at Texas Wesleyan University School of Law. Before coming to Texas
Wesleyan in 2007, she was a visiting associate professor of law at
West Virginia University College of Law and a Doctoral Fellow at
St. Thomas University in New Brunswick, Canada. Prior to teaching,
Professor Carpenter was in private law practice at Kirkpatrick
& Lockhart, LLP (now K&L Gates), where she enjoyed a lively
practice in the intellectual property practice group, representing
technology, multimedia, and sports and entertainment clients in a
variety of trademark and copyright issues, including prosecution,
licensing, and enforcement of those clients’ intellectual
property rights around the world. Professor Carpenter’s
scholarship interests exemplify her commitment to both intellectual
property and public service. She has published in the areas of
intellectual property and human rights both individually and
collectively, including, for example, an examination of copyright
legal principles as applied to the works of indigenous peoples. As
a lover of pop culture and a child of the 1980s, Professor
Carpenter is currently writing an article that examines the
intellectual property issues associated with the cultural icon of
the “mixed tape.” In addition, among her other achievements,
Professor Carpenter was the founder of Coal to Content, a nonprofit
organization dedicated to promoting the role of intellectual
property in economies transitioning from old to new, from industry
and manufacturing to information and invention. As part of this
effort, she was the founder and organizer of a seminal conference
designed to foster this dialogue, “Coal to Content: Intellectual
Property and Technology in the New Economy,” which took place in
Morgantown, West Virginia, in 2006. Professor Carpenter also writes
creatively; two of her creative works are being published in 2008
in the Legal Studies Forum. Professor Carpenter received an LL.M.
degree from the National University of Ireland at Galway in 2003.
She earned her J.D. from the West Virginia University College of
Law, where she was executive articles editor for the West Virginia
Law Review, the fourth oldest law review in the United States.
Professor Carpenter also earned a Master of Arts degree from West
Virginia University.
Deven Desai is Associate Professor of Law at the
Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego. After Professor Desai
graduated from law school, where he was co-editor-in-chief of the
Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, he practiced law with
Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges in Los Angeles. His
litigation practice focused on intellectual property,
Internet-related disputes, employment law and general business
disputes. After leaving Quinn Emanuel, he worked as in-house
counsel with technology incubation companies and Mattel, Inc., as a
policy and finance consultant for the Cory Booker for Mayor
campaign and for Jumpstart for Young Children, Inc., and as the
sole contributing editor on the primer Law of Internet Disputes.
Professor Desai’s scholarship is in the areas of intellectual
property, information theory, Internet-related law, business
associations, international business transactions and corporate
governance.
William T. Gallagher is an Associate Professor of
Law at Golden Gate University School of Law whose areas of
specialization include Intellectual Property Law, Litigation, and
the Legal Profession. He holds the following degrees: BA,
University of California, Berkeley; MA, University of Chicago; JD,
University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law; PhD,
University of California, Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law.
Before joining Golden Gate University, Professor Gallagher was a
partner in the San Francisco office of Townsend and Townsend and
Crew, specializing in intellectual property and complex business
litigation. He also was a lecturer in law and sociology at Santa
Clara University for eight years, teaching Intellectual Property
Law; Legal Ethics; and Business, Technology, and Society and is a
recurring visiting professor of international intellectual property
law at Vytautas Magnus University School of Law in Kaunas,
Lithuania. Professor Gallagher is the co-founder of the
Collaborative Research Network on Intellectual Property Law and
Policy for the Law and Society Association. His published articles
include "Ideologies of Professionalism and the Politics of
Self-Regulation in the California State Bar (Pepperdine Law Review)
and "Strategic Intellectual Property Litigation" (Santa Clara Law
Review). He is the editor of International Essays in Law and
Society: Intellectual Property (Ashgate Press 2007) and a member of
the California State Bar.
Shubha Ghosh is a Professor of Law at the
University of Wisconsin Law School and Associate Director at
INSITE. His scholarship and teaching are in the areas of
intellectual property theory and policy, competition policy, legal
theory, and institutional analysis of markets and legal
institutions. Professor Ghosh has published over fifty scholarly
articles, book chapters, books, and commentaries. Publishers of his
work include, the University of Pennsylvania Journal of
International Business Law, Oregon Law Review, International Review
of Law and Economics, San Diego Law Review, Florida Law Review,
Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, Tulane Law Review, Case
Western Law Review, Berkeley Technology Law Review, Law &
Policy, Buffalo Law Review, Illinois Law Review, The MIT Press, and
Cambridge University Press. Most recently, he is the co-author of
two legal casebooks: Intellectual Property in Business
Organizations (Lexis-Nexis 2006) and Intellectual Property: Private
Rights, Public Interest, and The Regulation of Creative Activity
(Thomson West 2007). He is under contract to write Global Issues in
Patent Law (with Thomson West) and Understanding Agency and
Partnership (with Lexis-Nexis). He is currently working on a
scholarly book on the role of markets and intellectual property
related institutions in international trade and development that
synthesizes his scholarly articles.
Christoph-Beat Graber, Professor of Law, is head
of the research centre i-call (International Communications and Art
Law Lucerne) of the University of Lucerne Faculty of Law and leader
of the NCCR eDiversity Project. He teaches in the fields of
communications and art law, international trade law and legal
sociology. He is member of the Swiss Federal Arbitration Commission
for the Exploitation of Author’s Rights and Neighbouring Rights,
advisor to various branches of the Swiss Government on matters
related to international trade and culture and member of the board
of editors of the Swiss journal of communications law
“medialex”. He is author of Handel und Kultur im
Audiovisionsrecht der WTO (Staempfli 2003), co-editor of Free Trade
versus Cultural Diversity: WTO Negotiations in the Field of
Audiovisual Services (Schulthess 2004), Digital Rights Management:
The End of Collecting Societies? (Staempfli 2005),
Interdisziplinäre Wege in der juristischen Grundlagenforschung
(Schulthess 2007) and Intellectual Property and Traditional
Cultural Expressions in a Digital Environment (Edward Elgar 2008).
Stuart J.H. Graham is a Ewing Marion Kauffman
Foundation Fellow in Social Science and the Law, University of
California, Berkeley - School of Law (Boalt Hall), and Assistant
Professor of Strategic Management, College of Management, Georgia
Institute of Technology. He teaches and conducts research on
intellectual property strategies, entrepreneurship, technology
transfer, and the legal environment of business. He received his
PhD in business economics at the University of California,
Berkeley, and holds advanced degrees in Law (JD), Business (MBA),
and Geographical Information Systems (MA). An attorney licensed to
practice law in the State of New York, he has written on
intellectual property and litigation strategies in the software and
biotechnology industries, comparative studies of the U.S. and
European patent systems, and the use by companies of patenting and
secrecy in their innovation strategies. A selection of his recent
publications includes "Software Patents: Good News or Bad News?" in
American Enterprise Institute/Brookings Institution Joint Center,
Intellectual Property Rights in Frontier Industries: Software and
Biotechnology (with D.C. Mowery); "Prospects for Improving U.S.
Patent Quality via Post-grant Opposition" in National Bureau for
Economic Research (NBER), Innovation Policy and the Economy IV
(with B.H. Hall, D. Harhoff, and D.C. Mowery), and "Submarines in
Software? Continuations in U.S. Software Patenting in the 1980s and
1990s" in Economics of Innovation and New Technology (with D.C.
Mowery). Professor Graham has conducted his research under grants
provided by the National Academies of Science, the National Science
Foundation, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and the OECD,
among others. He spent the 2007-2008 academic year at the Boalt
Hall School of Law (UC Berkeley) as the Kauffman Foundation Fellow
in Social Science and Law at the Berkeley Center for Law and
Technology.
Richard Gruner is Professor and Director of the
Center for Intellectual Property Law at the John Marshall Law
School. He holds a BS, California Institute of Technology; JD,
University of Southern California Law Center; and LLM, Columbia
University School of Law. Prior to coming to John Marshall in 2007,
Professor Gruner was on the faculty at the Whittier Law School in
Costa Mesa, California, where, beginning in 1983, he taught courses
in patent law, computers and law, corporate law, and white collar
crime. Before joining academia, he was an inside counsel to the IBM
Corporation. He has also served as a consultant to the U.S.
Sentencing Commission concerning corporate sentencing standards. He
is currently completing a PhD program at the University of
California, Irvine. Professor Gruner is the co-author of
Intellectual Property in Business Organizations: Cases and
Materials, a 2006 text that addresses the growing role of
intellectual property in the founding, growth, and disposition of
business enterprises, and Intellectual Property: Private Rights,
the Public Interest, and the Regulation of Creative Activity,
published in 2007. His article on “Corporate Patents: Optimizing
Organizational Responses to Innovation Opportunities and Invention
Discoveries” was rated by the editors of Intellectual Property
Law Review as “One of the Best Articles on Intellectual
Property” published in 2005-2006.
Debora J. Halbert is a Professor in the Department
of Political Science at the University of Hawai’i. Prior to
joining the faculty at Manoa, she was Associate Professor of
Political Science and Chair of the Department of History and
Political Science at Otterbein College in Ohio. Professor Halbert
has specialized in intellectual property issues, and her articles
on the topic have appeared in International Journal of the
Semiotics of Law, The Information Society, and Technological
Forecasting and Social Change. She is the author of Intellectual
Property in the Information Age: The Politics of Expanding Property
Rights (Quorum 1999) and Resisting Intellectual Property (Routledge
2005).
Steven Hetcher is a Professor of Law at Vanderbilt
University Law School. His research focuses on the role of social
norms in the law and challenges the economic account of custom and
tort law and the norms-based theories of first-generation law and
economics. His scholarship also concentrates on the internet,
intellectual property and privacy. Professor Hetcher joined the
Vanderbilt law faculty in 1998 after practicing at Arnold &
Porter. He holds a J.D. from Yale University, Ph.D. (Philosophy)
from the University of Illinois, M.A. (Public Policy) from the
University of Chicago, and B.A. from the University of Wisconsin.
He is the author of numerous publications including Norms in a
Wired World (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Darian Ibrahim is Assistant Professor of Law at
the University of Wisconsin Law School. Prior to joining the
Wisconsin faculty in Fall 2008, he taught at the University of
Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law. While at Arizona, Professor
Ibrahim was voted the Teacher of Year (2006-2007) by the student
body and co-created and co-directed the University’s Business/Law
Exchange. Professor Ibrahim’s scholarly interests include
corporate and securities law and the intersection of law and
entrepreneurship. His current research analyzes and compares the
various financing options that are available to high-tech
start-ups, including angel finance and venture capital. He has
current articles on angel investing, Delaware corporate law, and a
macro look at the field of law and entrepreneurship (with Gordon
Smith) in the Vanderbilt, Iowa, and Arizona law reviews. At
Wisconsin Professor Ibrahim teaches classes in business
organizations (public corporations), securities regulation, and a
seminar in law and entrepreneurship. Professor Ibrahim is a 1999
graduate of Cornell Law School (magna cum laude), where he was
Articles Editor of the Cornell Law Review, Order of the Coif, and a
recipient of the Fredric H. Weisberg Prize for Constitutional Law.
He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemical Engineering from
Clemson University in 1996 (magna cum laude) and was the recipient
of a number of honors, including an internship with Dow Chemical
Company.
Jeffrey Lipshaw is Associate Professor of Law
at Suffolk University Law School. He received his undergraduate
education at the University of Michigan and is a graduate of
Stanford Law School. Following law school graduation, Professor
Lipshaw practiced with the law firm of Dykema Gossett of Detroit,
Bloomfield Hills and Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he represented
technology start-ups. He has also served as a vice president and
general counsel for two corporations. In 2005, he moved from the
corporate world to teach as a visiting professor at Wake Forest
University School of Law and later at Tulane University Law School.
At Suffolk University Law School, Professor Lipshaw teaches Agency,
Partnership & the LLC and Securities Regulation. He has written
extensively on the intersection of law, uncertainty, contracts, and
judgment in business transactions, including “Why the Law of
Entrepreneurship Barely Matters," forthcoming W. New Eng. L. Rev.
(2009), "Law's Illusion: Scientific Jurisprudence and the Struggle
with Judgment" (2008) (working paper), and "Contracts and
Contingency: A Philosophy of Complex Business Transactions," 54
DePaul L. Rev. 1077 (2005).
Robin Paul Malloy is the E.I. White Chair and
Distinguished Professor of Law, and Founding Director of the Center
on Property, Citizenship, and Social Entrepreneurism at Syracuse
University College of Law. He also is holds a courtesy appointment
as Professor of Economics at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and
Public Affairs. He holds a B.S., Purdue University; J.D.,
University of Florida; and LL.M., University of Illinois. Professor
Malloy writes extensively on law and market theory and on real
estate transactions and development. He has 11 books in print, more
than 25 articles, and has contributed to 10 other books. His books
include, among others: Law in a Market Context: An Introduction to
Market Concepts in Legal Reasoning (Cambridge 2004); Law and Market
Economy: Reinterpreting the Values of Law and Economics (Cambridge
2000) (now translated into Chinese and Spanish); Real Estate
Transactions 3rd Ed. (with James C. Smith, Aspen Law Publishers,
2007); Law and Economics: A Comparative Approach to Theory and
Practice (West 1990) (now translated into Japanese); Planning for
Serfdom: Legal Economic Discourse and Downtown Development (Penn
1990). He is series editor for Disability Law and Policy (with
Peter Blanck, Cambridge 2007-Present); and Law, Property and
Society (Ashgate Publishing 2006-Present). He is a past Chair of
the Association of American Law Schools, Sections on Real Estate
Transactions, and Section on Law and Humanities. He was the
1996-97, Sun Life Research Fellow at Mansfield College, Oxford
University.
Sean O’Connor is Co-Director of the Graduate
Program in Intellectual Property Law and Policy and Faculty
Director of the Entrepreneurial Law Clinic and Associate Professor
of Law at the University of Washington School of Law. Professor
O'Connor specializes in intellectual property and business law
involving biotechnology, cyberspace/ information technology, and
new media/digital arts. He holds a J.D. from Stanford Law School,
M.A. (Philosophy) from Arizona State University, and B.A. (History)
from University of Massachusetts, Boston. He is Of Counsel to Seed
IP Law Group. Professor O'Connor is also Associate Director, Center
for Advanced Studies and Research on IP (CASRIP); Faculty Fellow,
Institute for Public Health Genetics; Faculty Fellow, Center for
Innovation & Entrepreneurship; and Faculty Fellow, Economics
Policy Research Center. He has written numerous articles and book
chapters, and is co-author of Genetic Technologies and the Law
(with Patricia Kuszler & Katherine Battuello; Carolina Academic
Press 2007).
Ted M. Sichelman is currently the Kauffman
Foundation Legal Research Fellow at the University of California,
School of Law, and will begin as an assistant professor at the
University of San Diego School of Law in fall 2009. His current
research efforts examine the effects of the patent system on
entrepreneurial companies, the role of patent law in the
commercialization of inventions, and the application of quantum
game theory to intellectual property law. Previously, Sichelman
practiced in the areas of intellectual property litigation and
transactions, appellate litigation, and venture capital finance at
the law firms of Heller Ehrman and Irell & Manella. Before
practicing, he founded and ran a venture-backed software company,
Unified Dispatch. Sichelman designed the company's software and is
named lead inventor on two filed patents. He also clerked for Judge
A. Wallace Tashima of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth
Circuit. He holds a J.D., magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School;
an M.S. in physics from Florida State University; and an A.B. in
philosophy, with distinction, from Stanford
University.