Janet Freilich

Janet Freilich

Professor of Law

Class of 1960 Scholar

BA, Cornell University
JD, Harvard Law School
Postdoctoral Fellowship, Harvard Law School


Biography

Professor Janet Freilich writes and teaches in the areas of patent law, intellectual property, information law, and civil procedure. She has published or has articles forthcoming in Science, the Review of Statistics and Economics, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, and others. Freilich was previously a professor at Fordham Law School where she received the Fordham Law Dean’s Distinguished Research Award. She has also received the Samsung-Stanford Patent Prize, the Irving Oberman Memorial Award in Intellectual Property, and the Cloud Based Research Computing Project Award.

Professor Freilich has spent time as a visiting scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management; Harvard Medical School’s Program on Regulation, Therapeutics, and Law; and at Boston University School of Law. She was Harvard Law School’s inaugural postdoctoral fellow in private law and intellectual property with the Program on the Foundations of Private Law. Prior to joining the academy, Freilich practiced law at Covington & Burling LLP. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and summa cum laude from Cornell University with a bachelor’s degree in molecular biology.

Publications

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  • Janet Freilich & Aaron S. Kesselheim, Design Patents: A Potential Threat to Drug Competition Applied Health Economics and Health Policy (2025)
    Scholarly Commons
  • Janet Freilich, W. Nicholson Price II & Aaron S. Kesselheim, Disappearing Data at the U.S. Federal Government New England Journal of Medicine (2025)
    Scholarly Commons
  • Janet Freilich & Aaron S. Kesselheim, Frequency and Nature of Generic “Design Around” of Brand-Name Patents in the United States Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics (2025)
    Scholarly Commons
  • Janet Freilich & W. Nicholson Price II, Data as Policy 66 Boston College Law Review (2025)
    Scholarly Commons
  • Janet Freilich & Aaron S. Kesselheim, The Patent Trial and Appeals Board: A Target for Prescription Drug Patent Reform? 332 JAMA (2024)
    Scholarly Commons
  • Janet Freilich, Michael J. Meurer, Mark Schankerman & Florian Schuett, A New Approach to Patent Reform 14 UC Irvine Law Review (2024)
    Scholarly Commons
  • Janet Freilich, Government Misinformation Platforms 172 University of Pennsylvania Law Review (2024)
    Scholarly Commons
  • Janet Freilich, Law as a Lamp Post Iowa Law Review (2024)
    Scholarly Commons
  • Janet Freilich & Sepehr Shahshahani, Measuring follow-on innovation 52 Research Policy (2023)
    Scholarly Commons
  • Janet Freilich & Soomi Kim, Is the Patent System Sensitive to Incorrect Information? The Review of Economics and Statistics (2023)
    Scholarly Commons
  • Janet Freilich, Patents' New Salience 109 Virginia Law Review (2023)
    Scholarly Commons
  • Janet Freilich, Paths to Downstream Innovation 55 U.C. Davis Law Review (2022)
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  • Janet Freilich, Ignoring Information Quality 89 Fordham Law Review (2021)
    Scholarly Commons
  • Janet Freilich, The Replicability Crisis in Patent Law 95 Indiana Law Journal (2020)
    Scholarly Commons
  • Janet Freilich, Patent Shopping 10 UC Irvine Law Review (2020)
    Scholarly Commons
  • Janet Freilich, Prophetic Patents 53 U.C. Davis Law Review (2019)
    Scholarly Commons
  • Janet Freilich & Lisa Larrimore Ouellette, Science Fiction: Fictitious Experiments in Patents 364 Science (2019)
    Scholarly Commons
  • Janet Freilich, Patent Clutter 103 Iowa Law Review (2018)
    Scholarly Commons
  • Janet Freilich & Jay P. Kesan, Towards Patent Standardization 30 Harvard Journal of Law & Technology (2017)
    Scholarly Commons
  • Janet Freilich, The Uniformed Topograhy of Patent Scope 19 Stanford Technology Law Review (2015)
    Scholarly Commons
  • Janet Freilich, The Paradox of Legal Equivalents and Scientific Equivalence: Reconciling Patent Law's Doctrine of Equivalents with the FDA's Bioequivalence Requirement 66 SMU Law Review (2013)
    Scholarly Commons
  • Janet Freilich, Patent Infringement in the Context of Follow-on Biologics 16 Stanford Technology Law Review (2012)
    Scholarly Commons
  • Janet Freilich, A Nuisance Model for Patent Law 2 University of Illinois College of Law (2011)
    Scholarly Commons

In the Media

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  • The New England Journal of Medicine March 26, 2025

    Disappearing Data at the U.S. Federal Government

    Janet Freilich co-authors an opinion.
    read more

  • Jama Network September 18, 2024

    A Target for Prescription Drug Patent Reform?

    Janet Freilich co-authors an opinion.
    read more

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Stories from The Record

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Activities & Engagements

No upcoming activities or engagements.

Courses

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY: LAW JD 857

4 credits

In our modern information economy, the law of intellectual property has taken on enormous importance to both creators and users. This course introduces students to the principles of trade secret, patent, copyright, and trademark law, and explores the ways in which those principles are shifting and adapting in response to new technology. The course is open to all upper level students, without prerequisite. No scientific or technical background is required.

FALL 2025: LAW JD 857 A1 , Sep 2nd to Dec 19th 2025
Days Start End Credits Instructors Bldg Room
Mon,Wed 2:10 pm 4:10 pm 4 Michael J. MeurerHaefner
SPRG 2026: LAW JD 857 B1 , Jan 12th to May 8th 2026
Days Start End Credits Instructors Bldg Room
Mon,Wed 2:10 pm 4:10 pm 4 Keith N. HyltonHaefner