Keith Aoki to Join Davis Law Faculty
Intellectual property legal scholar and well-known author Keith Aoki, currently a visiting law professor at Davis and the Philip H. Knight Professor of Law at the University of Oregon School of Law, has accepted an offer in principle to join the UC Davis School of Law faculty. Aoki is a leading expert in many aspects of intellectual property law, particularly property law, trademark and copyright law, and cyberlaw. He also brings expertise in patent law to bear on important environmental research involving the world's food supply as affected by globalized property, plant breeders' right, patents, and genetically-modified seed. Aoki is also an accomplished race and civil rights scholar.
His latest scholarship, Seed Wars: Cases and Materials on Intellectual Property and Plant Genetic Resources, is a comprehensive overview of the current domestic and international legal controversies regarding intellectual property protections for plant genetic resources (PGRs) over the past three decades. The book, forthcoming from the Carolina Academic Press, also speculates on possible directions that intellectual property protection for PGRs may take in the 21st century.
Aoki holds a law degree cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he sat on the editorial board for the Harvard Environmental Law Review and served on the editorial staff of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. He also holds a masters of law degree from the University of Wisconsin Law School. After law school, Aoki practiced law at Hale and Dorr, a Boston firm specializing in technology law.
Aoki has written extensively over the years, and his publications include articles in the California Law Review, Stanford Law Review, UC Davis Law Review (forthcoming), and Boston College Law Review.
"Aoki has also done important scholarship on immigration and civil rights," Associate Dean Kevin Johnson says, referencing Aoki's articles: "Centering the Immigrant in the Inter/National Imagination," California Law Review (1997) (with Robert Chang) and "No Right to Own?: The Early Twentieth-Century 'Alien Land Laws' as a Prelude to Internment," Boston College Law Review (1998) (published concurrently in the Boston Third World Law Journal). Johnson points out that, in the latter, Aoki skillfully analyzes how laws barring ownership of real property by aliens ineligible for citizenship (i.e., non-white immigrants) were directed at Japanese landowners and helped later facilitate the internment of persons of Japanese ancestry during World War II.
According to Aoki, he can trace his expansive interests in the field of property law to his early career as an artist. He earned two art degrees before law school, a bachelor of fine arts degree from Wayne State University and a master of arts degree from Hunter College. He is an ardent admirer of comic artists, and after art school moved to New York City, where he drew cartoons for the underground paper East Village Eye.
After deciding to go to law school, Aoki found that his interests in art and the law merged in the field of copyright law. Despite his extensive scholarship, Aoki never abandoned his love of art, and he managed to meld his research with the world of comic books. The comic book, Bound by Law?, illustrated by Aoki and written by colleagues James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins of Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain, tackles the legal notion of fair use. The graphic style enables artists and others to understand the complex issues involved in intellectual property law and see that these laws are a benefit rather than a hindrance to their creative work.
His latest scholarship, Seed Wars: Cases and Materials on Intellectual Property and Plant Genetic Resources, is a comprehensive overview of the current domestic and international legal controversies regarding intellectual property protections for plant genetic resources (PGRs) over the past three decades. The book, forthcoming from the Carolina Academic Press, also speculates on possible directions that intellectual property protection for PGRs may take in the 21st century.
Aoki holds a law degree cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he sat on the editorial board for the Harvard Environmental Law Review and served on the editorial staff of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. He also holds a masters of law degree from the University of Wisconsin Law School. After law school, Aoki practiced law at Hale and Dorr, a Boston firm specializing in technology law.
Aoki has written extensively over the years, and his publications include articles in the California Law Review, Stanford Law Review, UC Davis Law Review (forthcoming), and Boston College Law Review.
"Aoki has also done important scholarship on immigration and civil rights," Associate Dean Kevin Johnson says, referencing Aoki's articles: "Centering the Immigrant in the Inter/National Imagination," California Law Review (1997) (with Robert Chang) and "No Right to Own?: The Early Twentieth-Century 'Alien Land Laws' as a Prelude to Internment," Boston College Law Review (1998) (published concurrently in the Boston Third World Law Journal). Johnson points out that, in the latter, Aoki skillfully analyzes how laws barring ownership of real property by aliens ineligible for citizenship (i.e., non-white immigrants) were directed at Japanese landowners and helped later facilitate the internment of persons of Japanese ancestry during World War II.
According to Aoki, he can trace his expansive interests in the field of property law to his early career as an artist. He earned two art degrees before law school, a bachelor of fine arts degree from Wayne State University and a master of arts degree from Hunter College. He is an ardent admirer of comic artists, and after art school moved to New York City, where he drew cartoons for the underground paper East Village Eye.
After deciding to go to law school, Aoki found that his interests in art and the law merged in the field of copyright law. Despite his extensive scholarship, Aoki never abandoned his love of art, and he managed to meld his research with the world of comic books. The comic book, Bound by Law?, illustrated by Aoki and written by colleagues James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins of Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain, tackles the legal notion of fair use. The graphic style enables artists and others to understand the complex issues involved in intellectual property law and see that these laws are a benefit rather than a hindrance to their creative work.