BJ Ard

Associate Professor of Law

Contact

bj.ard@wisc.edu
608/265-1858
975 Bascom Mall, 6111 Law Building, Madison, WI, USA, 53706-1399

Curriculum Vitae

Websites:
SSRN

@bj_ard

Education

J.D., Ph.D., Yale Law School
B.A., M.A., University of Georgia

Biography

BJ Ard teaches and writes on copyright, intellectual property, and the intersections of law and technology. His recent scholarship has interrogated the law’s role in structuring intellectual production and competition in the information economy, including industries impacted by AI. Ard’s work appears in distinguished law journals including the Emory Law Journal, Washington & Lee Law Review, Maryland Law Review, and Yale Law Journal. He is also the co-author of sections of the leading copyright treatise Nimmer on Copyright.

Professor Ard completed his J.D. and Ph.D. at Yale Law School, where he was awarded the Stephen J. Massey Prize for his work in the Community and Economic Development Clinic and served as Managing Editor of Yale Law Journal. After law school, Ard served as a law clerk to Judge R. Lanier Anderson III on the Eleventh Circuit. He also worked as a visiting assistant professor at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law, a research fellow at the Yale Information Society Project, and in private practice at Irell & Manella LLP in Los Angeles.

The UW Law student body selected Ard as Law School Classroom Teacher of the Year for 2020–2021. He is a core faculty member for the National Science Foundation Traineeship Program INTEGRATE, an interdisciplinary program developed to address fundamental research challenges for the integration of robots into the future of work; he is also a principal investigator for the four-year National Science Foundation project “Defending the Supply Chain of Democracy,” a partnership with the Open Law Library and the NYU Tandon School of Engineering aimed at developing secure systems for publishing, archiving, and accessing the law.

Scholarship & Publications

SSRN

Law Repository

Research Interests

Intellectual Property
Copyright
Technology Law
Privacy
Legal Theory

Activities

BJ Ard presented "Copyright's Latent Space: From Fair Use to Generative Art" during the Works in Progress for IP Scholars Colloquium at Santa Clara University School of Law on Feb. 2, 2024.
BJ Ard presented "Copyright's Latent Space: From Fair Use to Generative Art" during the INTEGRATE Colloquium on Sept. 27, 2023.
BJ Ard presented "The Concept Formerly Known as Fair Use: Where We Are Post-Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith" during the State Bar of Wisconsin Seventeenth Annual Intellectual Property Academy on July 21, 2023. The presentation covered the Supreme Court's latest copyright decision and its implications for the future of transformative use. Ard also participated in a panel discussion on legal issues surrounding generative AI, focusing on the challenges that generative AI poses for copyright law.
BJ Ard's "The Not-so-great Transformation" has been posted to SSRN. In the paper, he writes "the law has not sat idle during the rise of informational capitalism; it has undergone extensive transformation and now facilitates corporate surveillance and manipulation on a global scale. Meanwhile, legal institutions have taken a turn towards managerialism and away from democratic accountability."
BJ Ard presented "Creativity Without IP? Vindication and Challenges in the Video Game Industry" during a conference on International Gaming: Laws and Regulations Around Games in the Digital Era hosted by Durham Law School in the United Kingdom on Sept. 8, 2022.
BJ Ard presented "Competition With and Without IP in the Video Game Industry" during the Workshop for Emerging Scholars in IP and Technology at Texas A&M University School of Law on Nov. 6, 2021.
BJ Ard joined a panel of national experts to explore the question, "What is Law and Technology?" on the Tech Refactored podcast hosted by the Nebraska Governance and Technology Center.