Steven Wilf

Steven Wilf is the Joel Barlow Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut, where he founded the Intellectual Property Program.  He received both his Ph.D. in History from Yale University and his law degree from Yale Law School in 1995.  Prior to joining the Connecticut faculty, he served as a law clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.  A scholar whose research focuses upon intellectual property law, historical jurisprudence, and legal history, he seeks to address the fundamental ways that the origins of legal processes effect normative outcomes.  Numerous essays and a recent book, The Law Before the Law (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), explore imaginative, often extra-official understandings of legalism. His latest book, Law’s Imagined Republic: Popular Politics and Criminal Justice in Revolutionary America, was published this year by Cambridge University Press.  Professor Wilf teaches Criminal Law, Development of the Regulatory State, Intellectual Property Law, and a variety of seminars on the legal regulation of knowledge.  He has been a visiting professor at Hebrew University, Jerusalem and DAAD guest professor at the Freie Universität, Berlin.  He also has held fellowships as John Carter Brown Fellow at Brown University, Fellow in Comparative Legal History at the University of Chicago, Samuel I. Golieb Fellow at the New York University Law School, and Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem.   This past academic year, he was the Microsoft Fellow in Law, Property, and the Economic Organization of Society at Princeton University's Program in Law and Public Affairs.  His current scholarship, which includes articles in The Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts, Transformations in American Legal History (Harvard University Press), and Theoretical Inquiries in Law, examines the development of intellectual property law.  In addition to teaching at the Law School, he will be engaging in research at the Smithsonian Institution as a 2011-2012 Fellow at the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation.