Our Mission
The Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy provides a unique environment where scholars can examine the key drivers of innovation as well as the law and policy that best support innovation. By fostering interdisciplinary and collaborative research on innovation law and policy, the Engelberg Center attracts legal scholars and practitioners, technologists, economists, social scientists, physical scientists, historians, innovators, and industry experts who study, theoretically and empirically, the incentives that motivate innovators, how those incentives vary among different types of creative endeavor, and the laws and policies that help or hinder them. The Engelberg Center endeavors to facilitate programming, publications, and other interactions that refine our understanding of the policy implications of this research and communicate those implications to stakeholders and decision-makers, both nationally and internationally.
In addition to the world-class faculty and scholars it attracts, the Engelberg Center draws on the diversity of New York City, which is a center for creativity in advertising, art, cuisine, entertainment, fashion, financial services, graphic design, law, life sciences, literature, marketing, music, and technology, among other fields. We seek to enhance the ecosystem that supports close connections between IP scholars and the innovator community in and around the city.
Alfred B. Engelberg
The Engelberg Center is named for Alfred B. Engelberg, a 1965 cum laude graduate of NYU School of Law, who has enjoyed an unusually varied career in the field of intellectual property law. Al received a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Drexel University in 1961 and worked in every aspect of patent law over a career spanning more than forty years. He was a patent examiner (1961), a patent agent at Esso Research and Engineering (1962-1965), a patent trial attorney in the Justice Department (1965-1968) and a member of the firm of Amster, Rothstein & Engelberg of New York City (1969-1985). As counsel to the Generic Pharmaceutical Association, Engelberg played a key role in the negotiations that led to the Patent Term Restoration Act of 1984 (the “Hatch-Waxman Act”) and was the originator of the controversial Bolar exemption and the patent challenge and generic exclusivity provisions of the Act. In 1985, Engelberg created a venture with Schein Pharmaceutical, a privately owned generic drug manufacturer, that focused on asserting pharmaceutical patent challenges under the Hatch-Waxman Act. He was a pioneer in establishing Hatch-Waxman patent challenge litigation as an important area of intellectual property law. Engelberg’s varied career experiences led him to conclude that there was a need for leading law schools to become more seriously engaged in scholarly research and critical thinking with respect to innovation law and policy. In 1994, he made the commitment to create and support the Center on Innovation Law and Policy at NYU School of Law.
