Jane C. Ginsburg


Jane Carol Ginsburg is an American attorney. She is the Morton L. Janklow Professor of Literary and Artistic Property Law at the Columbia Law School. She also directs the law school's Kernochan Center For Law, Media and the Arts. In 2011, Ginsburg was elected to the British Academy.

Career

An expert on copyright, Ginsburg has written various treatises and law review articles. She received her B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Chicago, her J.D. degree from Harvard Law School, a DEA with a Fulbright grant, and a Doctor of Law degree from Panthéon-Assas University. At Harvard, she served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review. After law school, she clerked for Judge John Gibbons of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
She is the daughter of United States Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and law professor Martin Ginsburg, both of whom formerly served on the Columbia Law School faculty. Justice Ginsburg and Jane are the first mother–daughter pair ever to serve on the same law faculty in the United States. Her brother is founder of Cedille Records, James Steven Ginsburg.

In popular culture

In the 2018 feature film On the Basis of Sex, a biography of her mother Ruth, a teenage Jane is portrayed by Cailee Spaeny.

Personal life

In 1981 Ginsburg married George T. Spera Jr. of Mays Landing, New Jersey. Her husband works for the law firm Shearman & Sterling. They have two children. Their son, Paul Spera, an actor, graduated from Yale in 2008 with a double major in French and theater studies. Their daughter, Clara Spera, graduated from Harvard Law School in 2017. She is married to Scottish actor Rory Boyd; the pair met at the University of Cambridge and now live in New York.