Silbey02.25.20 — Professor Jessica Silbey has been selected as the 56th Robert D. Klein Lecturer. She will deliver her talk, “Against Progress: Intellectual Property and Fundamental Values in the Internet Age,” at 2:00 p.m. on Wednesday, October 14. The lecture will be live-streamed from Northeastern’s Egan Research Center. 

The Klein University Lecturer Award was established in 1964, upon the recommendation of the Faculty Senate, and honors a member of the faculty who has contributed with distinction to his or her own field of study. The Klein University Lecture enables that faculty member to share the fruits of that scholarship with the university community and the general public. In 1979, the award was renamed in tribute to the late Robert D. Klein, professor of mathematics, chairman of the Faculty Senate Agenda Committee, and vice chairman of the Faculty Senate. Professor Silbey is the third law professor to receive this high honor — Daniel Medwed and Kara Swanson were previously selected.

Professor Silbey is director of the law school’s Center for Law, Innovation and Creativity (CLIC). She is an affiliate professor of English in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities and core faculty at the NuLab for Maps, Texts, and Networks. In 2018, Professor Silbey was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for her interdisciplinary work in law and the humanities. Her scholarship focuses on the empirical and humanistic dimensions of the legal regulation of creative and innovative work. She studies common and conflicting narratives within creative and innovative communities and the IP law and policy that purport to regulate them. Her most recent book is The Eureka Myth: Creators, Innovators and Everyday Intellectual Property and she is working on a new book, Against Progress: Intellectual Property and Fundamental Values in the Internet Age. In addition to her intellectual property research, Professor Silbey writes about the use of film as a legal tool and the representations of law in popular culture.

Professor Silbey has been a Distinguished Lecturer at the University of Washington (Shidler Lecture) and at the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts at the University of Georgia. She was a Faculty Associate at the Harvard Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society and is currently an Affiliate Fellow at the Yale Information Society Project.

Professor Silbey graduated from Stanford University with a B.A. in Comparative Literature and from University of Michigan with her J.D. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature. She clerked for Judge Robert E. Keeton on the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts and Judge Levin Campbell on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. She practiced law in the disputes department of the Boston office of Foley Hoag LLP focusing on intellectual property, bankruptcy and reproductive rights before starting her career as a law professor at Suffolk University Law School (2005-2015).

About Northeastern University School of Law

The nation’s leader in experiential legal education since 1968, Northeastern University School of Law offers the longest-running, most extensive experience-based legal education program in the country and is a national leader in legal education reform. Founded with cooperative legal education as the cornerstone of its program, Northeastern guarantees its students unparalleled practical legal work experiences. All students participate in full-time legal placements, and can choose from the more than 1,500 employers worldwide participating in the school’s signature Cooperative Legal Education Program. Northeastern University School of Law blends theory and practice, providing students with a unique set of skills and experience to successfully practice law.

For more information, contact d.feldman@northeastern.edu.