Harvard Law School Conference on Intellectual Property Law

The 2010 conference was an in-depth discussion among a distinguished collection of legal minds from academia, private practice and the judiciary. Our speakers offered their diverse perspectives on the latest developments in intellectual property law. For the fourth time since 2003, judges, top legal scholars and experienced practitioners examined some of the key issues shaping intellectual property law, both in the courts and in practice.

For our first panel, we developed a mock fact pattern in a reasonably simple patent case and invited judges from four different jurisdictions to hear oral argument at the same time. They included Judge Paul R. Michel, Chief Judge of the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit until his retirement this May; Judge Klaus Grabinski of the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe, Germany, the highest court to hear patent appeals in Germany; Judge Toshiaki Iimura of the Intellectual Property High Court of Japan; and John Baldwin, a UK barrister and member of the Queen's counsel specializing in IP cases.

The conference was held at the Harvard Law School Ames Courtroom in Cambridge, Massachusetts.