Wendy J. Gordon

Professor of Law, School of Law, LAW

Wendy J. Gordon has taught at Boston University since 1993, having taught at Rutgers, Georgetown, University of Michigan and other schools before arriving here. Her scholarship utilizes economics as well as ethics and analytic philosophy to understand copyright, trademark, and related forms of intellectual property. She is probably best known for her analyses of copyright’s “fair use” doctrine and of John Locke’s theory of property. For fair use, she shows that the supposedly puzzling doctrine responds well to practical and normative defects in markets. As for Locke, his historic property theory is commonly understood as implicitly justifying broad intellectual property rights, but Gordon shows how Locke’s logic instead justifies broad free speech liberties and only intellectual property rights that are remarkably narrow.

Professor Gordon enjoys interdisciplinary teaching as well as interdisciplinary scholarship. At BU she has co-taught a course in law and literature with a literary critic, a course on political theory with a philosopher, and a course on ‘copyright and rhetoric’ with a Shakespearean actor.

Professor Gordon’s current scholarly project builds on her hypothesis that copyright infringement can be usefully understood as a mirror-image of the law of accidental injury. Both copyright liability and the personal-injury tort of “negligence” can be seen as modes of improving private decision-making: The threat of negligence liability decreases careless behavior by making appropriate actors know they will bear some cost of the harm they cause. Conversely, the promise of copyright liability increases creative behavior by enabling appropriate actors to capture some profit from the benefits they generate.

Professor Gordon has co-authored two books on the economics of copyright, published numerous law journal articles, and written book chapters on copyright issues, free speech, computer copyright, and the fair use doctrine. She serves on the editorial board of the European Journal of Law and Economics. The US Supreme Court has three times cited her scholarship. She has received a Fulbright scholar, was elected by Oxford’s St. John’s College to a Visiting Senior Research Fellowship, and was selected as a resident at the Rockefeller Foundation retreat in Bellagio. Professor Gordon has also been the Bacon-Kilkenny Distinguished Visitor at Fordham, a Visiting Fellow at Oxford’s Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy, and the “Intellectual Property Distinguished Visitor” at the Lewis and Clark Law School. She has twice served as the Chair of the Association of American Law Schools Section on Intellectual Property.