Chris Sprigman

Christopher Jon Sprigman came to NYU School of Law in 2013 from the University of Virginia School of Law. Sprigman teaches intellectual property law, antitrust law, torts, and comparative constitutional law. His research focuses on how legal rules affect innovation and the deployment of new technologies. He is the co-author of a free copyright textbook, Copyright Law: Cases and Materials (2022, with Jeanne Fromer), and The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation (2012, with Kal Raustiala). He has also authored and co-authored numerous articles in law reviews and other scholarly publications.

Sprigman’s widely cited works have had an influence on important aspects of copyright and trademark law, and often belie the conventional wisdom about intellectual property rights. He was an appellate counsel from 1999 to 2001 in the Antitrust Division of the US Department of Justice, where US v. Microsoft was among his cases, and later was elected partner in the Washington, DC, office of King & Spalding before becoming a residential fellow at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society.

Sprigman received his BA in history magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania in 1988, and a JD with honors from the University of Chicago Law School in 1993. He subsequently clerked for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Justice Lourens H. W. Ackermann of the Constitutional Court of South Africa. In 2015, the American Law Institute named him Reporter for the Restatement of Copyright.