Jessica Silbey

Professor Jessica Silbey is a Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law. She teaches and writes in the areas of intellectual property, constitutional law, and law and the humanities. In 2018, she was a Guggenheim Fellow and completed a book supported by that fellowship called Against Progress: Intellectual Property and Fundamental Values in the Internet Age. In this book, Professor Silbey considers intellectual property debates in law and culture as a bellwether of changing social justice needs in the 21st century. Additionally, Professor Silbey authored The Eureka Myth: Creators, Innovators and Everyday Intellectual Property. In it, she challenges the traditional notion that intellectual property merely creates financial incentives to spur innovation.

In addition to her research on intellectual property and constitutional law, Professor Silbey writes and speaks about the use of film as a legal tool and the representations of law in popular culture. She is the co-editor of several books on these topics.

Professor Silbey is an affiliate fellow at Yale’s Information Society Project and was a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. 

She previously chaired the Association of American Law School’s national Section on Intellectual Property and served on its Presidential Conference Film Committee for eight years.

Before joining Boston University School of Law, Professor Silbey was a faculty member at Northeastern University School of Law and Suffolk University Law School.

Prior to that, she practiced law in the disputes department of a Boston firm – focusing on intellectual property, bankruptcy, and reproductive rights.

Professor Silbey graduated with a JD from the University of Michigan Law School and holds a PhD in comparative literature from there as well which helps her in studies of literature and film and that intersection with the force of law.

(Photograph by Mark Ostow)