Research Expertise and Interest

public policy, intellectual property law, new information technologies, traditional legal regimes, information management, copyright, software protection and cyberlaw

Research Description

Pamela Samuelson is the Richard M. Sherman Distinguished Professor of Law Boalt Hall, where she has taught since 1996. She is a Co-Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology. She has had a joint appointment with the School of Information. She began her career as a legal academic at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. While there, she was a visiting professor at Columbia Law School, Cornell Law School and Emory Law School. She also practiced with Willkie Farr & Gallagher's New York office. Samuelson has written and published widely in the areas of copyright, software protection and cyberlaw. From 1997 through 2002, Samuelson was a fellow of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. She is also a fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery. In 2001 she was appointed to a UC Berkeley Chancellor's Professorship for distinguished research, teaching and service for her contributions to both Boalt Hall and the School of Information. In 2002 she was named an honorary professor at the University of Amsterdam. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She co-founded with Berkeley colleagues a nonprofit organization, Authors Alliance, that serves the public interest by encouraging authors to take advantage of advances in digital technologies to make their works more widely available. She is chair of that organization's board of directors, and is also vice chair of the board for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.