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Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Professor of Law

Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Shyam Balganesh’s scholarship 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 examines the Legal Realist origins of copyright law's modern tests to determine infringement, and shows that they were rooted in a dystopian vision of lower court fact-finding that has since come to be discredited by the U.S. legal system. Continue reading…

Expertise

  • Copyright
  • Property Law
  • Intellectual Property
  • Patent Law
  • Law and Technology
  • Legal Philosophy

Articles and Book Chapters

Causing Copyright, 117 COLUM. L. REV. 1 (2017).

The Immanent Rationality of Copyright Law, 115 MICH. L. REV. 1047 (2017).

The Constitutionalization of Indian Private Law, in THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF THE INDIAN CONSTITUTION (Sujit Choudhry, Madhav Khosla & Pratap Banu Mehta eds., Oxford 2016).

The Folklore and Symbolism of Authorship in American Copyright Law, 54 HOUS. L. REV. 403 (2016).

The Questionable Origins of the Copyright Infringement Analysis, 68 STAN. L. REV. 791 (2016).

Copyright and Good Faith Purchasers, 104 CALIF. L. REV. 269 (2016).

Equity's Unstated Domain: The Role of Equity in Shaping Copyright Law, 163 U. PA. L. REV. 1859 (2015) (with Gideon Parchomovsky).

Structure and Value in the Common Law, 163 U. PA. L. REV. 1241 (2015) (with Gideon Parchomovsky).

Codifying the Common Law of Property in India: Crystallization and Standardization as Strategies of Constraint, 63 AM. J. COMP. L. 33 (2015).

Unplanned Coauthorship, 100 VA. L. REV. 1683 (2014).

Judging Similarity, 100 IOWA L. REV. 267 (2014) (with Irina D. Manta & Tess Wilkinson-Ryan).

Copyright Infringement Markets, 113 COLUM. L. REV. 2277 (2013).

Gandhi and Copyright Pragmatism, 101 CALIF. L. REV. 1705 (2013).

Stewarding the Common Law of Copyright, 61 J. COPYRIGHT SOC'Y U.S.A. 103 (2013).

The Uneasy Case Against Copyright Trolls, 86 S. CAL. L. REV. 723 (2013).

The Normativity of Copying in Copyright Law, 62 DUKE L.J. 203 (2012).

The Obligatory Structure of Copyright Law: Unbundling the Wrong of Copying, 125 HARV. L. REV. 1664 (2012).

Quasi-Property: Like, But Not Quite Property, 160 U. PA. L. REV. 1889 (2012).

"Hot News": The Enduring Myth of Property in News, 111 COLUM. L. REV. 419 (2011).

The Pragmatic Incrementalism of Common Law Intellectual Property, 63 VAND. L. REV. 1543 (2010).

Tiered Originality and the Dualism of Copyright Incentives, 95 VA. L. REV. IN BRIEF 67 (2009).

Foreseeability and Copyright Incentives, 122 HARV. L. REV. 1569 (2009).

Debunking Blackstonian Copyright, 118 YALE L.J. 1126 (2009).

Demystifying the Right to Exclude: Of Property, Inviolability, and Automatic Injunctions, 31 HARV. J L. & PUB. POL’Y 593 (2008).

More publications can be found here.

Research Areas

  • Copyright Law
  • Intellectual Property Law
  • Property Law & Theory
  • Common Law Theory

Positions

Penn Law – Professor of Law (2014- ); Assistant Professor of Law (2009-14); Co-Director Penn Center for Asian Law (2014- )

University of Chicago Law School – Bigelow Fellow & Lecturer in Law (2007-09)

Law Clerk to Justice (later Chief Justice) V.N. Khare of the Supreme Court of India (Winter 2002)

World Bank - Legal Consultant (Summer 2005)

Union for the Public Domain (UPD), Washington, DC - Board Member and World Intellectual Property Organization Standing Committee on Copyright & Related Rights (WIPO-SCCR) Representative (2004- )

Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, New York – Summer Associate (2006)

Courses

  • Property Law
  • Copyright Law
  • Copyright Theory
  • Property Theory

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