Intellectual Property Scholarship and Impact

Our Center for Innovation and its three initiatives: the Start-up Legal Garage, the Law & Medicine Initiative, and the AI Law & Innovation Institute, harness industry expertise and ground breaking scholarship to ensure IP law innovates apace with technological innovation.

Recent News

UC Law SF Launches Institute to Study AI Law & Innovation

UC Law SF’s new AI Law & Innovation Institute (AILII) was founded this year by Professor Robin Feldman. AILII will help administrative agencies, courts, lawmakers, and students adapt to rapid changes in AI.

Professor Feldman has been providing her expertise and technical advice on AI to federal and state government bodies such as Congress and the Government Accountability Office and Patent & Trademark Office for a number of years.

At AILII, she has assembled a dynamic team of industry experts and scholars, whose contributions to AI law and policy will solve the problems of the future, today.

Students Foster Business and Legal Innovation

The launch of the Center for Innovation’s latest initiative, the AI, Law & Innovation Institute, saw UC Law SF welcome three scholars to our academic community: Marcus Eagan of AI infrastructure company Trace Machina; Zac Henderson of digital health company Levels; and Merav Avital-Magen of the International Department at the Money Laundering and Terror Financing Prohibition Authority.

In spring 2024, the Startup Legal Garage (SLG) partnered with 15 corporate and four patent startups. To date, more than 600 students have been launched into the world of startup law, with SLG serving over 550 startups. An impressive 80% of these startups are still in business today.

Research conducted by the Law & Medicine Initiative has been published in the Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics, PLOS Medicine, and the Journal of Law and the Biosciences, among others.

A group photo taken on 14 November 2024 of attendees at LexLab's Tech Law Table Talk on Legal Operations

Inaugural Justice Technology Accelerator Program Helps Eight Startups

Our annual Justice Technology Accelerator program welcomed eight startups in its inaugural year for a 10-week a justice tech startup accelerator program. The 2023 curriculum was presented by UC Law SF’s LexLab, alongside gener8tor, Village Capital, and SpiceBox.

The program culminated in a demo day in November 2023, where the eight startups showcased their work to investors and members of the justice tech community.

Two startups that offer legal help to people who might be unable to afford traditional legal services took home top prizes. Namesake Collaborative, a platform that helps people navigate complex legal processes for changing names and gender markers; and Level, which aims to ensure everyone gets fair treatment from insurers after a car accident, tied for first place to split the $5,000 grand prize, with each taking home $2,500 in prize money.

Selected Scholarship

Robin Feldman continues researching ways in which companies exploit intellectual property laws to drive up drug prices. Her most recent works exploring this topic include Trailing Edge: Facilitating Patient Choice for Insulin Products (2024), Journal of Law and the Biosciences, Paucity of Intellectual Property Rights Information in the U.S. Biologics System a Decade After Passage of the Biosimilars Act (2024), PLOS Medicine, and Patent Term Extensions and the Last Man Standing (2023), Yale Law & Policy Review. She also continues to support government-agency policymaking and regularly testifies before Congress.

Ben Depoorter is exploring what happens when copyright disputes go to small claims court. His forthcoming article, Copyright Small Claims: An Empirical Analysis explores this issue.

AI, IP, and the Law

UC Law SF is at the geographic epicenter of generative-AI innovation and that innovation is part of our teaching and research.

Robin Feldman’s article Artificial Intelligence and Cracks in the Foundations of Intellectual Property is forthcoming in UC Law Journal.

Zac Henderson’s article Artificial Intelligence, Probabilistic Dispute Resolution, and the Small Claims Wasteland is forthcoming in Wisconsin Law Review.

Ben Depoorter is researching pursuing an empirical project on the emerging AI-powered model of automated mass copyright infringement.