Justin Hughes

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Justin Hughes is a law professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City. He also serves as Director of the law school's Intellectual Property Program. In 2003, he was the Hosier Distinguished Visiting Professor in Intellectual Property at DePaul College of Law in Chicago.

From 1997 to 2001, Professor Hughes worked as an attorney-advisor in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, focusing on the Administration's initiatives in Internet-related intellectual property issues, Eleventh Amendment immunity issues, intellectual property law in developing economies, and copyright appellate filings for the United States (including the Napster litigation).

Prior to working in Washington, Professor Hughes practiced law in Paris and Los Angeles; he also clerked for the Lord President of the Malaysian Supreme Court in Kuala Lumpur. He was a Henry Luce Scholar and a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities.

Prior to his academic career, Hughes worked in Bill Clinton’s presidential campaigns, then joined the Clinton administration in 1997 as an IP and internet policy expert. He was educated at Oberlin and Harvard, where he was one of philosopher Robert Nozick’s research assistants.

[edit] Scholarship and policy work

As a law school student, Hughes wrote a highly influential law review article, The Philosophy of Intellectual Property, Georgetown Law Journal (1988). Still widely read and cited, the article was translated into Chinese in 2006 (China Intellectual Property Review, from Renmin University)

Professor Hughes is often viewed as a “pro-IP” academic in contrast to academics like Pam Samuelson and Larry Lessig, but several of Hughes’ articles argue for limits to copyright [such as Size Matters (or Should) in Copyright Law, Fordham Law Review (2005)]. He also recently published a thorough critique of geographical indications law [Champagne, Feta, and Bourbon: The Spirited Debate about Geographical Indications, Hastings Law Journal (2006)].

At the policy level, Professor Hughes is frequently credited with slowing down legislative proposals for “database protection” that circulated in Washington following the European Union’s 1996 Database Directive. On the other hand, the Congressional Record names him as one of the administration officials who helped craft the heavily-criticized Digital Millennium Copyright Act. (DMCA)

[edit] Beyond intellectual property

In the 1990s, Justin Hughes did volunteer work in election monitoring and democracy development in several countries. Since 2006, he has been chairman of the board of the Thomson Foundation for Cinema and Film Heritage, the corporate foundation of Paris-based Thomson SA, the parent company of Technicolor.