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Balganesh elected to ALI

January 17, 2017

Shyamkrishna Balganesh, an expert on copyright law, was elected to the American Law Institute.
Shyamkrishna Balganesh, an expert on copyright law, was elected to the American Law Institute.
Penn Law professor Shyamkrishna Balganesh was one of 58 lawyers, judges, and law professors recently elected to the American Law Institute.

Penn Law professor Shyamkrishna Balganesh was one of 58 lawyers, judges, and law professors recently elected to the American Law Institute (ALI), the ALI announced on January 9.

Founded in 1923, the ALI is an independent organization that produces scholarly work to clarify, modernize, and improve the law. It currently has 2,900 elected members, which includes eminent lawyers, judges, and academics.

“This is a well-deserved honor for Professor Balganesh,” said Ted Ruger, Dean of the Law School and Bernard G. Segal Professor of Law. “His scholarship on copyright law and property law, and how modern legal regimes have deep roots in the common law, is novel and important, and makes invaluable contributions to several fields.”

Balganesh’s research focuses on understanding how intellectual property and innovation policy can benefit from the use of ideas, concepts, and structures from different areas of the common law, especially private law. His most recent work tries to understand authorship in copyright law using ideas and principles from the common law of causation.

“I have the highest regard for the ALI, its mission, and its contributions to American law over the years,” said Balganesh, who also serves as an adviser for the ALI’s project on the Restatement of the Law, Copyright. “The ALI’s projects help to define and distill fields of legal thought for courts, practitioners, and academics, and I am delighted to be involved in its work.”

Along with Balganesh, Adjunct Professor of Law James A. Feldman, a faculty member in Penn Law’s Supreme Court Clinic, was also elected to the ALI, along with Law School alumni Ron Eisenberg L’81, Heath Tarbert L’01, and Alice Beck Dubow L’84.

Eisenberg is Deputy District Attorney in the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office, Tarbert is a partner at Allen & Overy LLP in Washington, D.C., and Dubow is a judge in the Superior Court of Pennsylvania.

Penn Law faculty members are active participants in the ALI’s Restatement of Law projects. Tom Baker currently serves as Reporter for the Restatement of the Law, Liability Insurance; Kermit Roosevelt serves as Reporter for the Restatement of the Law Third, Conflict of Laws; Anita L. Allen and Christopher Yoo serve as advisers for the Restatement of the Law, Data Privacy; and Steve Burbank serves as an adviser for the Restatement of the Law Third, Conflict of Laws. Catherine Struve serves on the Council of the ALI, its governing board of directors.