Biographies

Peter S. Menell is the Koret Professor of Law at UC Berkeley School of Law, co-founder and Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, and co-founder and Faculty Director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute. Professor Menell earned his S.B. from MIT, his Ph.D. (economics) from Stanford University, and J.D. from Harvard Law School, where he served as a member of the HARVARD LAW REVIEW. After graduating from law school, he clerked for the Honorable Jon O. Newman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Professor Menell joined the law faculty at the University of California at Berkeley in 1990, where his research and teaching has focused on intellectual property law, judiciary reform, environmental law and policy, property law, and law and economics. Professor Menell has authored more than 100 articles and 15 books, including leading casebooks and intellectual property treatises.

    Professor Menell is co-author of INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IN THE NEW TECHNOLOGICAL AGE, the best-selling U.S. intellectual property casebook for over two decades. Professor Menell has organized more than 60 intellectual property education programs for the Federal Judicial Center, including an annual multi-day program on “Intellectual Property in the Digital Age” since 1998. He is the lead author of the PATENT CASE MANAGEMENT JUDICIAL GUIDE, now in its third edition, published by the Federal Judicial Center. He has advised the U.S. Congress, U.S. Copyright Office, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Federal Trade Commission, Office of Technology Assessment, state Attorneys General, and major technology and entertainment companies on a wide range of intellectual property and antitrust matters. Professor Menell served as Vice-Chair of the National Academies of Sciences project on copyright and innovation. During 2012-13, Professor Menell served as one of the inaugural Thomas Alva Edison Visiting Professionals at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. In 2013, he presented the Copyright Society of the United States’ 42nd Annual Donald C. Brace Memorial Lecture. In 2018, the California Lawyers Association recognized Professor Menell’s contributions to the intellectual property field with its IP Vanguard Award. In 2019, Professor Menell presented the Melville B. Nimmer Memorial Lecture at UCLA School of Law.

Ella Corren is a doctoral (J.S.D.) student at UC Berkeley School of Law and a Lloyd M. Robbins Fellow. Her involvement with this project grew out of work as a research assistant for Professor Menell. Corren’s research considers the social and legal implications of emerging technologies, focusing on issues of intellectual property, antitrust, and privacy. Corren graduated from Berkeley Law’s LL.M. Thesis Track Program (Dean’s List honors), Tel Aviv University School of Law (LL.M., cum laude), and the Hebrew University School of Law (LL.B.), where she was an editor for the Hebrew University Law Review, Israel’s leading law journal. Prior to her doctoral studies, Corren worked as a senior associate for Israel’s largest law firm, Herzog, Fox & Neeman, where she represented tech companies in commercial, regulatory, and transactional matters, and advised on intellectual property and privacy matters. Prior to that, Corren served in Israel’s Military Advocate General, as a legal advisor (Captain) for the Israeli Medical Corps, and as a legal advisor (Lieutenant) for the Israeli Air Force.

Mark D. Janis is the Robert A. Lucas Chair of Law and the Director of the Center for Intellectual Property Research at the Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law. He has authored a number of books, including the treatise IP and Antitrust (with Hovenkamp, Mark Lemley, Douglas Leslie, and Michael Carrier), Trademarks and Unfair Competition in a Nutshell, two casebooks (Trademarks and Unfair Competition: Law and Policy (4th ed.), and Trade Dress and Design Law, both with Graham Dinwoodie) and other books on trademark law (with Graham Dinwoodie). He has published numerous law review articles and book chapters on patent law, intellectual property and antitrust, trademark law, intellectual property protection for plants, plant biotechnology and intellectual property protection for designs.

Shyamkrishna Balganesh is the Sol Goldman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, where he writes and teaches in the areas of copyright law, intellectual property, and legal theory. He has written extensively on understanding how intellectual property and innovation policy can benefit from the use of ideas, concepts, and structures from different areas of the common law, especially private law. His recent work explores the interaction between copyright law and key institutional features of the American legal system. Balganesh’s work has appeared in leading law journals. He is also a co-author of sections of the leading copyright law treatise Nimmer on Copyright.

     Before joining the Columbia Law School faculty, Balganesh was a professor of law and co-director of the Center for Technology, Innovation and Competition at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. Prior to that, he was a Bigelow Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was an articles and essays editor of the Yale Law Journal and a student fellow at the Information Society Project. Prior to that, he spent two years as a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford, where he received a B.C.L. and M.Phil.

Christopher Buccafusco is Professor of Law at Yeshiva University’s Cardozo Law School, Director of Cardozo’s Intellectual Property & Information Law Program, and Associate Dean for Faculty Development. Professor Buccafusco’s research covers a wide range of topics and methods related to creativity, innovation, and intellectual property law. He uses novel social science experiments to explore the nature of innovation markets, and he writes about evolving issues in copyright, patent, and trademark law, including music copyright litigation, pharmaceutical patents, and protection for industrial design. Professor Buccafusco co-hosts an annual workshop on empirical methods in intellectual property law with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office and Northwestern University Law School.

Professor Buccafusco is also a co-author of Happiness and the Law and a series of articles that apply recent social science research on well-being to legal issues, including criminal, administrative, tort, and intellectual property laws.

Prior to coming to Cardozo, Professor Buccafusco taught at Chicago-Kent College of Law. He won the SBA teaching award in his first year on the faculty, and he later won the university-wide teaching award. At Chicago-Kent, Professor Buccafusco co-founded the Center for Empirical Study of Intellectual Property.

Sarah Burstein is Professor of Law at the University of Oklahoma College of Law, where she focuses design parents, trade dress, copyright in the visual arts, and comparative design law. Prior to joining the faculty at OU, she worked as an intellectual property litigation associate in the Chicago office of Kirkland & Ellis LLP and clerked for the Honorable Robert W. Pratt in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Iowa. Professor Burstein has a law degree from the University of Chicago and B.A. in Art & Design from Iowa State University.

Mark McKenna is the John P. Murphy Foundation Professor of Law, Director of the Notre Dame Technology Ethics Center, and Co-Director, Program on Intellectual Property & Technology Law at Notre Dame Law School.  He teaches and writes in the areas of intellectual property and privacy law. He is widely recognized as a leading intellectual property scholar.  Though his core area of expertise is trademark law, Professor McKenna has written broadly on nearly every area of intellectual property, including utility patent, design patent, copyright, and the right of publicity.  His most recent work has focused on the intersection of intellectual property rights regimes and the intersection of IP rights with adjacent rights.

   Prior to joining the Notre Dame faculty, McKenna was a member of the faculty at Saint Louis University School of Law and practiced law with an intellectual property firm in Chicago, where he primarily litigated trademark and copyright cases. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 1997 with a degree in Economics and earned his J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law in 2000.

Joshua Sarnoff is Professor Law at DePaul College of Law, where focuses on intellectual property law, environmental law, health law, and constitutional, administrative, and international law. From January 2014 to July 2015, he served as the Thomas A. Edison Distinguished Scholar at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.  Professor Sarnoff clerked for the Honorable Irving L. Goldberg of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He has substantial practice experience in the public and private sectors and as an academic providing litigation, counseling, and advocacy services addressing international and domestic environmental, intellectual property, and food and drug laws.  He has consulted for or advocated on behalf of legislative coalitions, intergovernmental organizations, foundations, corporations, non-profit organizations, and various groups of academics.  He has filed numerous amicus briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (including for the American Medical Association and for law professors).  He earned his S.B. from MIT and JD from Stanford Law School.

    Professor Sarnoff’s current research focuses on: innovation policy and technology development; climate change technology and data, climate modification, and governance; utility and design patent empirical analyses, history, and theory; responses to pandemic diseases; and intellectual property rights in genetic and natural resources, diagnostics, and therapeutics. He is the editor and co-author of the Research Handbook on Intellectual Property and Climate Change (Edward Elgar Publ. 2016), and has published extensively in law reviews and peer reviewed journals.

Christopher V. Carani is a Shareholder at McAndrews and has been at the firm since 1995. He practices in all areas of intellectual property law with a particular emphasis on design law. Mr. Carani has extensive experience litigating design patent cases, including representations before U.S. district courts, the Federal Circuit, the U.S. Supreme Court and the International Trade Commission. In 2019, Intellectual Asset Management (IAM) magazine named him to its IAM Strategy 300: The World’s Leading IP Strategists list, with IAM magazine noting that he is “one of the world’s leading design patent strategists.”

    Mr. Carani Chris has extensive experience in creating valuable design right portfolios. He represents some of the world’s most design-centric companies, including the top filer of U.S. design patents. He has procured thousands of strategic design rights, both in the U.S and in over 70 countries around the world. He counsels a wide range of clients (big and small) on design protection and enforcement issues and is often called upon to render infringement, validity and design-around opinions.

     Mr. Carani is currently the chair of the International Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property (AIPPI) Design Rights Committee. He is the former chair of the American Bar Association’s Design Rights Committee, and also a member of the American Intellectual Property Law Association’s (AIPLA) Committee on Industrial Designs.

     Mr. Carani is on the faculty of the Northwestern University School of Law as an Adjunct Professor of Law teaching Intellectual Property Law & Policy, a course which covers patent, trademark, copyright and trade secret law. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law teaching a course on Design Law, which is one of only a few such courses in the U.S.

    Prior to joining McAndrews, Mr. Carani served as a law clerk to the Honorable Rebecca R. Pallmeyer of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. He earned his JD from The University of Chicago Law School and hold a BS in Engineering from Marquette University.

Estelle Derclaye is Professor of Intellectual Property Law on the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Nottingham School of Law. Professor Derclaye’s main interest is intellectual property law, in particular copyright and designs law, IP overlaps and IP and well-being. From 2008 to 2010, she was a member of the Copyright Expert Panel of the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property Policy, which advised the UK Intellectual Property Office. In 2014, she was appointed as a member of the unregistered rights expert advisory group advising the UK Intellectual Property Office. She is a member of the European Copyright Society, a group of European academics aiming to influence policy-making and its president elect (2021-2022). She is also a member of the University of Nottingham’s Commercial Law Centre.

     Professor Derclaye is the author of The Legal Protection of Databases, A Comparative Analysis (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2008), editor of Research Handbook on the Future of EU Copyright (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2009) and Copyright and Cultural Heritage: Preservation and Access to Works in a Digital World (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2010) and co-author with A. Strowel of Droit d’auteur et numérique: logiciels, bases de données et multimédia – Droit belge, européen et comparé (Bruylant, 2001) and with M. Leistner of IP Overlaps: A European Perspective (Hart Publishing, 2011). Since 2010, she updates the European Union chapter in L. Bently (eds) International Copyright Law and Practice, Lexis Nexis. Her latest edited collection The Copyright/Design Interface: Past, Present and Future was published with Cambridge University Press in March 2018.

     Before joining the University of Nottingham faculty, Professor Derclayre practiced intellectual property in an international law firm in Brussels and prior to that, she was a lecturer at the Universities of Leicester and London (Queen Mary).Professor Derclaye holds degrees in law from the University of Liège (Licence en droit; Diplome d’Etudes Specialisées en droit), The George Washington University (LLM) and London (PhD).

Elizabeth Ferrill is a partner at Finngan, where she specializes in on all aspects of design patents, including prosecution, counseling, post-grant, and litigation. Elizabeth counsels clients who hold design patents as well as those accused of infringement. She has experience with design patents related to consumer and industrial products, medical devices, transportation and construction vehicles, and graphical user interfaces and icons. She has prosecuted families of design patents before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), directed prosecution in foreign countries, and argued appeals before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). She has a special interest in strategic counseling related to acquiring for worldwide protection for designs. She also litigates design patent matters at the U.S. district court level that include trade dress claims. In addition, she has appeared before the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

     Ms. Ferrill is Vice Chair of the Intellectual Property Owners Association’s Industrial Designs Committee and has been recognized by Intellectual Asset Management as a leader in patent litigation and transactions in the D.C. area, and nationally for design patents.

     Before beginning her legal career, Elizabeth graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy and served five years on active duty as a communications officer. She earned an MS in computer science at Georgia Insitute of Technology and a JD from the University of North Carolina. Prior to joining Finnegan, Ms. Ferrill served as a judicial law clerk to the Honorable Liam O’Grady at the U.S. District Court for the E.D. of Virginia, Alexandria Division. She is an adviser and contributor to Finnegan’s Federal Circuit IP blog.

Jack Hicks is a partner at Womble Bond Dickinson, where he advises a wide range of global companies on crafting legal strategies to protect their intellectual property rights and advance their standing in the international marketplace. His practice includes managing complex IP matters, from Federal and State litigation to international patent and trademark filing strategies.  Mr. Hicks is a leader of Womble Bond Dickinson’s Manufacturing Industry Sector. In this role, he represents a diverse group of manufacturing and services providers, with a focus on the furniture, outdoor recreation, apparel, food and beverage, nanotechnology and aerospace industry sectors. Prior to becoming an attorney, he was a design engineer on airborne radar and optics applications of a major aerospace company.

    Mr. Hicks regularly represents clients based outside the US, including Europe and Asia, as well as US companies doing business overseas. He also serves as an Adjunct Law Professor at Elon University.

    Mr. Hicks earned his BS and MS in mechanical engineering at the University of Virginia and his JD at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law.

Charles L. Mauro is president and Founder of MAURO Usability Science (MUS), a New York-based consulting firm, founded in 1975, offering services in usability science, formal user-centered product design, high-performance user interface design and design IP rights. Mr. Mauro is a Certified Human Factors Engineering Professional BCPE. Mr. Mauro has personally managed over 4,000 research and development projects over his 40-year career as a leading expert in human factors engineering, product design, and design research.  The Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) has given its highest recognition the Personal Achievement Award to Mr. Mauro.

     Mr. Mauro has a BS in Industrial Design from Los Angeles Art Center College of Design and a masters degree in ergonomics and biomechanics from New York University (NYU). Before forming MUS he worked directly with product design pioneers Henry Dreyfus and Raymond Loewy.  He was directly responsible for research and development of mission-critical user interfaces, including the design of primary trading systems used on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. His experience spans more than 40 years and includes consumer, commercial, military, and aerospace applications.

     Mr. Mauro has received the Alexander C. Williams Award from the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society and citations from IDSA, NASA and the Association for Computing Machinery.  Mr. Mauro served on several national and international panels and have chaired two ANSI standards committees.  He also served on the Presidential Design Awards Program for the NEA and was a founding member of the Human Factors Society Special Interest Group on Consumer Products.  He has consulted with many leading corporations on strategic issues of screen-based UX optimization, product design, usability science, Intellectual property, and fixed to virtual migration of products and services.

     He has served as an expert in over 75 major IP cases covering design patents, trade dress, copyright, utility patents related to GUI & product design. Mr. Mauro holds numerous U.S. and international patents.

Perry Saidman is a recognized U.S. design law pioneer, blazing a trail in this specialty long before it became popular. He is perhaps the leading US advocate for legal protection for industrial designs. Mr. Saidman is the Founder and first chair of the Industrial Design Committee of the American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA), was the keynote speaker at first National Conference on Industrial Design Law, Founder of the Design Protection Section of IDSA (Industrial Designers Society of America). He is a member of the IPO Design Rights Committee and INTA’s Design Protection Committee.

     Mr. Saidman has testified before the US Congress, House Judiciary Committee, regarding spare parts legislation. He has served as an expert witness in dozens of design patent and trade dress cases, and is the author of numerous papers regarding design patents, trade dress and copyrights. Perry has spoken to many groups of intellectual property lawyers and industrial designers. He served as an Adjunct Professor of Design Law at GWU Law School in Washington DC. He has authored many amicus briefs involving design patents before the U.S. federal courts.