Chicago-Kent Global Professor Graeme Dinwoodie to Be Inducted into IP Hall of Fame

Chicago-Kent College of Law Global Professor of Intellectual Property Law Graeme Dinwoodie has been named as a 2020 inductee into the IP Hall of Fame. The IP Hall of Fame honors outstanding individuals who have made a game-changing, positive impact on the global IP landscape.

“I am honored to have been selected as an inductee to the IP Hall of Fame and delighted to join such an eminent group of prior recipients. They include luminaries who have shaped our field and whose work has informed my research,” Dinwoodie says. “I have been privileged to teach intellectual property law to so many wonderful students. My students have been a constant source of inspiration and have prompted me to think harder about the subject of intellectual property law. I am grateful to all my colleagues and students for enabling me to earn this accolade.”

New inductees to the IP Hall of Fame are chosen by members of the IP Hall of Fame Academy, which includes inductees from previous years and other distinguished members of the global IP community following a nomination process. The IP Hall of Fame includes living and deceased individuals, such as Thomas Jefferson, Victor Hugo, and Giles Rich, one of the principal authors of the 1952 Patent Act. This year’s inductees also included a UK Supreme Court justice, a former USPTO acting director, and a trailblazing trademark lawyer.

Dinwoodie is an internationally renowned trademark law scholar who has served as a consultant to the World Intellectual Property Organization on matters of private international law and as a consultant to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development on the Protection of Traditional Knowledge. He was an adviser to the American Law Institute Project on Principles on Jurisdiction and Recognition of Judgments in Intellectual Property Matters and is currently an adviser to ALI’s Copyright Restatement project.

“Being selected to the IP Hall of Fame is a singular achievement for any IP professional’s career. This honor has been bestowed on only a handful of professors, all luminaries in the field. Yet Graeme Dinwoodie’s selection is no surprise,” says Edward Lee, Chicago-Kent professor of law and co-director of the program in intellectual property law. “He is a prolific scholar whose writings have profoundly shaped our understanding of trademark law, design protection, and international intellectual property. His reputation and influence are indeed global.”

Dinwoodie first joined the Chicago-Kent faculty in 2000, before being appointed to the Chair in Intellectual Property Law at the University of Oxford in 2009, where he was also director of the Oxford Intellectual Property Research Centre. He returned to Chicago-Kent in 2018, and is now co-director of the law school’s intellectual property law program. Dinwoodie was elected as a member of ALI in 2003 and remains a visiting professor of law at Oxford.

The International Trademark Association awarded him the 2008 Pattishall Medal for Teaching Excellence in the field of trademarks and trade identity law, a prestigious teaching honor that is awarded only once every four years. That same year, Dinwoodie won INTA’s Ladas Memorial Award for his article “Confusion Over Use: Contextualism in Trademark Law” (with M. Janis).

In 2018, Dinwoodie co-founded Chicago-Kent’s Center for Design, Law & Technology, which promotes research, scholarship, and instruction at the intersection of creativity, technology, design, and the law. It is the first U.S. institution devoted to research of design and design law protection.

Dinwoodie is the author of many law review articles, books and casebooks, including A Neofederalist Vision of TRIPS: The Resilience of the International Intellectual Property Regime (with Rochelle Dreyfuss), Trademarks and Unfair Competition: Law and Policy (with Mark Janis), Trade Dress and Design Law (with Mark Janis), and International Intellectual Property Law and Policy (with Shira Perlmutter, Bill Hennessey and Graeme Austin). His scholarship is widely cited by scholars in the United States and abroad.

Dinwoodie is currently working on a new book, International Trademark Protection: Territoriality in a Post-National Age. The book explores the growing disconnect between the territorial nature of trademark rights and the transborder nature of goodwill, and suggests ways of reconciling the need for global protection with consumer understandings that are defined by social and commercial exchange rather than political boundaries.

Chicago-Kent’s Intellectual Property Program is regularly ranked among the top in the country and the best in the Midwest.  Chicago-Kent is the only U.S. law school to offer an LL.M. in International Intellectual Property Law.

Read the full list of 2020 IP Hall of Fame inductees here.