AALS sections provide opportunities for law school faculty and staff to connect on issues of shared interest. Each section is focused on a different academic discipline, affinity group, or administrative area. For a full list of sections and information on how to join, visit www.aals.org/sections.
As part of the ongoing “Spotlight on Sections” series, AALS sat down with the leadership of the Section on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Issues and the Section on Law and Mental Disability. Views expressed by interviewees are not necessarily representative of AALS or their home institutions.
By Zaena Ballon
Chair-Elect: Amy Landers, Drexel University Thomas R. Kline School of Law
Why did you join the Section on Intellectual Property Law?
Patricia L. Judd: I liked the people who were active in the section, and I saw an opportunity within the section for a concerted focus on important topics. The opportunity to focus on discrete topics for discussion is hard to find in many other national conferences or groups working in the IP space. Apart from dedicated symposia, most IP conferences are works-in-progress conferences featuring disparate pieces and topics.
Why did you decide to join the section’s leadership?
Amy Landers: I liked the opportunity to guide the dialogue toward topics that need to be discussed. These topics include metaverse, AI, or controversial technologies, which have been the focal points for panels over the last three years. I reached a point in my career where I wanted to give back to our field. We work together as a team, and it’s a very satisfying way to work with others passionate about IP. It’s another way to get to know even more people in the field, from junior to senior colleagues.
What is the section’s structure?
PJ: We have a chair and a chair-elect, and three to five other executive committee members. We have four other members this year.
What do your members research and teach?
PJ: Most of our members are active in some intellectual property or technology law subset. Intellectual property is a strange discipline in that it isn’t just one area of the law. In the US, several different, discrete areas of law—with different regulatory structures—make up the umbrella of “IP.” I tell my students in the introductory IP course that they are getting a “fourfer”—they are getting to study patents, trade secrets, copyrights, and trademarks, each of which could be—and often is—a separate course. And that “fourfer” doesn’t even count lesser-taught IP disciplines such as design patents and the right of publicity. The umbrella also doesn’t include the international regulatory structure or IP-adjacent areas such as privacy and tech regulation. We all put ourselves under this umbrella, but one of the wonderful things about this section is that we’re all doing something different.
How does your section support scholarship from your members?
PJ: Fortunately, we are in a substantive community with a robust scholarship support system for its specialists. There are tons of works-in-progress conferences in IP out there—I would venture there are more than exist in most disciplines. The section has found its place within that environment by focusing on two things— (1) bringing scholars together to talk about a single chosen, timely topic, such as the theme of the main panel every year, and (2) supporting pre-tenure scholars with a dedicated Emerging Voices program at the annual meeting. What’s special about that program is that it isn’t just an opportunity for these pre-tenure scholars to present their work. We pair them with a senior scholar doing similar work. That person reads the draft before the meeting and offers detailed, individualized feedback on that paper. This pairing often results in an ongoing relationship between presenter and reviewer, which only serves to enhance the scholarly support provided at the physical program.
What are some important conversations happening right now in legal education regarding intellectual property?
PJ: Let’s discuss a few. Artificial intelligence is front and center, as it is in several other legal disciplines. In the IP space, AI raises issues of inventorship, authorship, infringement, and fair use. Can AI-assisted inventions or creations receive patents or copyrights? Does the use of IP-protected material in AI training constitute infringement? Is any subset of that use fair? These are questions that will keep IP scholars busy for some time.
AI is also impacting other areas of IP, such as trade secret law and the right of publicity. How does the power of AI to scan and synthesize data affect what steps trade secret owners have to take to keep their secrets? What rights does someone have in their image or likeness in the age of deepfakes and other AI-generated replicas and mashups?
IP academics are also discussing the regulation of other emerging technologies apart from what we would deem strictly “AI.” Social media regulation is one example that comes up often. Social media platforms and their various uses raise data privacy and free speech issues, as well as core IP issues such as intermediary liability, trademark protection, and more.
Patents and public health, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, is a huge topic. What is the role of the IP community in ensuring both the development and dissemination of medicines? How can we create or leverage structures revisited during the pandemic to improve equitable access? Are the legal architectures, such as contracts governing tech transfer or partial waivers of IP rights, working? What new structures could be more effective, such as vaccine manufacturing hubs, patent pools, and similar concerted efforts?
The concept of fair use in the copyright and trademark contexts has gotten a lot of attention, especially by the Supreme Court, in recent years, with some new doctrines developing in assessing fair use and some older doctrines being questioned. The concepts of expressive fair use and the transformative nature of use will only grow in importance as we look toward AI-generated and assisted works. There’s a free speech angle with regard to this subject, too, as a lot of the recent cases also involve parodies or criticisms.
What are some other surprising ways we’ve seen IP law become a bigger part of the public consciousness?
AL: I can give a few examples, particularly with the COVID-19 vaccine products; people are beginning to understand the tension between patent law’s incentive structure and access to medicines. This has important impacts both domestically and worldwide. It has important implications in the public debate over the cost of medicines and health care.
Media, including social media, has also spread more information about how IP law impacts artists. Many of my students have long understood copyright through stories concerning Taylor Swift, as earlier music lovers learned from artists like Tom Petty. The issues surrounding trademarks and TikToker Jules LeBron, who popularized the phrase “Very Mindful, Very Demure,” have helped people understand how TM rights can make or break an influencer’s finances in life-changing ways. It’s easy to trivialize this space, but they can reach the broader public, and there is a significant sector of the economy there.
How has intellectual property law and your approach to teaching changed over time?
AL: IP law changes quickly. As with many law school subjects, issues relevant to these courses have expanded. Technology has long been a factor in the IP space, but AI has created new wrinkles. At the January 2025 meeting, we’re hosting a pedagogy panel that addresses AI issues for both IP courses and beyond. Certainly, the US Supreme Court’s decisions present new and challenging material every year across the entire range of IP courses. Both congressional and state law developments must be incorporated. Finally, the roles of the relevant agencies have become a more important topic than ever.
At the 2024 AALS Annual Meeting, the section hosted a program about if copyrights or patents could be filed for machine-generated inventions, literary, or artistic works. What sort of themes did the session address?
AL: The session primarily addressed two themes—authorship/inventorship and infringement by training models. One speaker gave participants an overview of the copyright-AI landscape, including the lawsuit filed by the New York Times concerning use of Times content in AI training models. Another talked about the role of AI in development of medicines. A third spoke to the tensions between machine creativity and copyright law, arguing that machine learning should be immune from copyright liability. And a fourth presented an international view of autonomous creation, and how comparative approaches may inform US intellectual property approaches to the subject.
What does the section have planned for the 2025 AALS Annual Meeting?
PJ: We are really excited about our programming this year. The section arranged a panel entitled “Good Bad or Ugly: Is Intellectual Property Incentivizing the Wrong Kinds of Technologies?” This panel will look at the social welfare served by the intellectual property constructs we have, and whether those constructs are achieving laudable societal goals.
As part of that inquiry, the panel will examine controversial technologies such as firearms, explicit goods, medicines and more. That panel is co-sponsored by the Section on Comparative Law.
We also have a pedagogical panel entitled “Intellectual Property Professors’ Roles: Legal Education in the Era of Artificial Intelligence,” which explores the particular expertise that IP professors may be able to employ in preparing institutions to thrive in the AI age. That panel is co-sponsored by the Sections on Internet and Computer Law; Technology, Law, and Legal Education; and Legal Writing, Reasoning, and Research.
Finally, we have our annual Emerging Voices program featuring senior commentary on junior papers.
What is your vision for the section this year and in the years to come? What new initiatives, project-based or ongoing, would you like to see as part of the section?
AL: It would be interesting to foster more collaboration between the IP section and other sections. Although we frequently invite co-sponsors of our programs and co-sponsor those of others, the collaboration usually stops there. One of the things about sections within AALS is that it is easy to work in a silo. Many of the issues we as law professors face—in our writing and our teaching—cut across disciplines and require inputs from different areas of expertise. AALS is uniquely situated to provide a forum for cross-disciplinary interactions, and I hope that the IP section in the future will consider ways to expand its collaborations with sections representing other disciplines.
What are the best ways for interested faculty to get involved with this section?
AL: Come to the programs, submit for the panels, or volunteer as a senior commentator. The section is a very open, welcoming group of people and has worked to remain that way and embody those qualities through the years. If you are willing to serve as part of the section leadership, respond to the calls from junior to senior professors and those in between before the annual conference. It’s a great way to help shape the section.PJ: This section is one of many ways to get involved in the IP community, but it’s important because of its situation within an important national organization. As mentioned, AALS’s special contributions to the IP community are (a) the opportunity to designate topics for concerted attention within a national conference and (b) the opportunity to collaborate with professors doing other types of work. AALS provides opportunities to join forces with other sections on issues of common interest. IP doesn’t operate in isolation; no area of the law does.