Molly Shaffer Van Houweling joined the Berkeley Law faculty in fall 2005 from the University of Michigan Law School, where she had been an assistant professor since 2002. Van Houweling’s teaching and research interests include intellectual property, law and technology, property, and food law.
Van Houweling serves as a member of the Advisory Council of Creative Commons (following six years as Chair of the Board of Directors) and is a founding Director of Authors Alliance. She is an Associate Reporter on the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law of Copyright and an Adviser to the Restatement of the Law of Property. She served as Berkeley Law’s Associate Dean for J.D. Curriculum & Teaching from 2015-2022.
Much of Professor Van Houweling’s research focuses on copyright law’s implications for new information technologies (and vice versa). She often explores this and other intellectual property issues using theoretical and doctrinal tools borrowed from the law of tangible property. Her recent scholarly work includes “The New Private Law and Intellectual Property,” in the Oxford Handbook of the New Private Law (2020); and “Intellectual Property as Property,” in the Research Handbook on the Economics of Intellectual Property Law (2019).
In 2020, Professor Van Houweling received the campus-wide Extraordinary Teaching in Extraordinary Times Award. In 2022 she received the Law School’s Rutter Award for Teaching Distinction.
Professor Van Houweling graduated from the University of Michigan and Harvard Law School. She clerked for Judge Michael Boudin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and Justice David H. Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Education
B.A., University of Michigan (1994)
J.D., Harvard Law School (1998)
Molly Van Houweling is teaching the following courses in Spring 2024:
• 220F sec. 001 - Food Law and Policy
• 227.2 sec. 001 - Satisfaction in Law and Life