Leading global authority on international intellectual property law moves from Oxford to Chicago-Kent

International IP scholar Graeme B. Dinwoodie, the professor of intellectual property law and information technology law at the University of Oxford, will move full-time to Chicago-Kent College of Law as a Global Professor in Intellectual Property Law. Professor Dinwoodie, who currently holds the IP Chair at Oxford, is a leading international authority in trademark law, design law and international intellectual property law.

Professor Dinwoodie's decision to re-join Chicago-Kent full-time reflects his enthusiasm for the law school's Program in Intellectual Property Law, which he directed from 2001 to 2009, helping to build the program's international reputation before he departed to take up the IP Chair at Oxford. While at Oxford, he has also been Director of the Oxford Intellectual Property Research Centre and a Professorial Fellow at St. Peter's College.

In 2017, for the first time in eight years, Professor Dinwoodie taught again at Chicago-Kent, this time as a University Professor. He says that experience demonstrated to him that the law school and the IP Program had retained the excellence and energy that led to its ranking as one of the top IP programs in the US, relying now on a new cohort of faculty and students. He noted that the IP Program had reinvented itself to stay ahead of the curve.

"The unique international and comparative dimension to the IP program has over the last decade been superbly augmented by new ongoing initiatives exploring the enhanced involvement of the US Supreme Court in the field, encouraging the use of empirical research to develop or critique current law, and cultivating a growing partnership with the practicing bar in the pro bono Patent Hub," he said.

In addition, Professor Dinwoodie is looking forward to being co-founder and co-director of the newly-announced Chicago-Kent Center for Design, Law & Technology, and to participating again in the Chicago IP Colloquium, the LLM in International Intellectual Property Law, and the innovative Strategies in IP capstone course, all of which were founded during his time as director of the program.

Professor Dinwoodie came to the United States in 1987 as a John F. Kennedy Scholar at Harvard Law School, having graduated first in his law school class at the University of Glasgow. He completed his LLM at Harvard Law School and his JSD at Columbia Law School. After practicing with Sullivan and Cromwell in New York, he began teaching at the University of Cincinnati College of Law, where in five years he was a three-time recipient of the Goldman Prize for Excellence in Teaching.

He is the author of many books and casebooks, including A Neofederalist Vision of TRIPS: The Resilience of the International Intellectual Property Regime (Oxford University Press 2012) (with R. Dreyfuss), Trademarks and Unfair Competition: Law and Policy (4th ed. 2014) (with M. Janis), Trade Dress and Design Law (2010) (with M. Janis), and International Intellectual Property Law and Policy (2d ed. 2008) (with W. Hennessey, S. Perlmutter & G. Austin); dozens of articles, book chapters and other substantial works; and numerous essays and shorter works. His scholarship is widely cited by scholars in the United States and abroad.

Professor Dinwoodie has held a number of visiting or honorary positions, including as the Yong Shook Lin Visiting Professor of Intellectual Property Law at the National University of Singapore, a Global Professor of Law at New York University School of Law, an Honorary Professor of Law at the University of Strasbourg, a Senior Fellow at the Hanken Business School in Helsinki, the George P. Smith II Distinguished Visiting Chair at Indiana University Maurer School of Law, a Chair in Intellectual Property Law at the University of London, Queen Mary College, and a visiting professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law.

In 2016, Professor Dinwoodie was appointed a University Professor at Chicago-Kent, which is reserved for "highly distinguished faculty who may be appointed by the President [of Illinois Institute of Technology] in recognition of their national reputations."

Professor Dinwoodie was elected to membership in the American Law Institute in 2003. In 2008, he received the Pattishall Medal for Teaching Excellence in the field of trademarks and trade identity law—awarded only once every four years—from the International Trademark Association. That same year, his article Confusion Over Use (with M. Janis) was awarded the Ladas Award for Best Article on Trademark Law by INTA.

He is a past chair of the Intellectual Property Section of the Association of American Law Schools and was president of the International Association for the Advancement of Teaching and Research in Intellectual Property (ATRIP) from 2011–13. Professor Dinwoodie served as an adviser to the American Law Institute Project on Principles on Jurisdiction and Recognition of Judgments in Intellectual Property Matters, and currently serves as the only non-US based adviser on the ALI's project on the Restatement of Copyright Law.

Professor Dinwoodie has also 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.