James Boyle
William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law
James Boyle is William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law and co-founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School. He joined the faculty in July 2000. He has also taught at American University, Yale, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He is the editor of Critical Legal Studies (Dartmouth/NYU Press (1994), special editor of Collected Papers on the Public Domain (Duke: L&CP 2003), author of Shamans, Software and Spleens: Law and Construction of the Information Society (Harvard University Press 1996) and, most recently, the co-author of Bound By Law, (CSPD 2006) a comic book(!) on fair use in documentary film. He is the winner of the 2003 World Technology Award for Law for his work on the "intellectual ecology" of the public domain, and on the new "enclosure movement" that seems to threaten it.
Professor Boyle has written on legal and social theory, on issues ranging from political correctness to constitutional interpretation and from the social contract to the authorship debate in law and literature. For the last ten years, his work has focused on intellectual property. His essays include "The Second Enclosure Movement," a study of the economic rhetoric of price discrimination in digital commerce, and a "Manifesto on WIPO." His shorter pieces include "Missing the Point on Microsoft," a speech to the Federalist Society called "Conservatives and Intellectual Property," and numerous newspaper articles on law, technology and culture. He currently writes as an online columnist for the Financial Times' New Economy Policy Forum.
Professor Boyle teaches Intellectual Property, Law and Literature, Jurisprudence and Torts. He is one of the founding Board Members of Creative Commons, which is working to facilitate the free availability of art, scholarship, and cultural materials by developing innovative, machine-readable licenses that individuals and institutions can attach to their work, and of Science Commons, which aims to expand the Creative Commons mission into the realm of scientific and technical data. He is also a member of the academic advisory boards of the Electronic Privacy and Information Center, the Connexions open-source courseware project, and of Public Knowledge. In 2006 he received the Duke Bar Association Distinguished Teaching Award.