Walter J. Derenberg Professor of Intellectual Property Law; Vice Dean

NYU Law Bio

Professor Jeanne Fromer specializes in intellectual property, including copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret, and design protection laws. Some of her recent and forthcoming scholarship studies trademark registrations empirically to examine whether we are running out of effective trademarks, including in a global multilingual economy; trade secret and copyright laws in light of growing uses of artificial intelligence; the mismatch between memes and copyright law; the claiming systems for design protection pursuant to copyright, design patent, and trademark laws; and the protectability of fashion designs in intellectual property. She is faculty co-director of the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy.

Professor Fromer is currently an Adviser for the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law, Copyright. She is the co-author, with Chris Sprigman, of a free copyright textbook, Copyright Law: Cases and Materials, which is in use at 65 law schools around the world. In 2011, Professor Fromer was awarded the American Law Institute’s inaugural Young Scholars Medal for her scholarship in intellectual property.

Before coming to NYU, Professor Fromer served as a law clerk to Justice David H. Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court and to Judge Robert D. Sack of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. She also worked at Hale and Dorr LLP (now WilmerHale) in the area of intellectual property. In addition, she was an Alexander Fellow with the New York University School of Law and a Resident Fellow with Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. Professor Fromer was a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and Stanford Law School, and she also previously taught at Fordham Law School.

Professor Fromer earned her B.A., summa cum laude, in Computer Science from Barnard College, Columbia University. She received her S.M. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for research work in artificial intelligence and computational linguistics and worked at AT&T (Bell) Laboratories in those same areas. As a graduate student, Professor Fromer was both a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and an AT&T Laboratories Graduate Research Fellow. Professor Fromer received her J.D., magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School, serving as Articles and Commentaries Editor of the Harvard Law Review and as Editor of the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology.