Pamela Samuelson


Pamela Samuelson is the Richard M. Sherman '74 Distinguished Professor of Law and Information Management at the University of California, Berkeley with a joint appointment in the UC Berkeley School of Information and Boalt Hall, the School of Law..

Education and early career

A 1971 graduate of the University of Hawaii and a 1976 graduate of Yale Law School, Samuelson practiced law as a litigation associate with the New York law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher before becoming an academic. From 1981 through June 1996 she was a member of the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, from which she visited at Columbia, Cornell, and Emory Law Schools.

Academic career

She was appointed Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School for the Fall 2007 term. She is also Co-Director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology and a co-founder of Authors Alliance. She has been a member of the University of California at Berkeley School of Law faculty since 1996.

Technology and society

Her principal area of study is intellectual property law. She has written and spoken about the challenges that new information technologies are posing for public policy and traditional legal regimes. She founded the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic at the University of California at Berkeley in 2000, with funding from Mitch Kapor and with an endowment from Smauelson and her husband, Bob Glushko. She is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, a Contributing Editor of Communications of the ACM, a past Fellow of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, an Honorary Professor of the University of Amsterdam. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and of the Open Source Applications Foundation, as well as a member of the Advisory Board for the Electronic Privacy Information Center. In 2013, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In 2016, Samuelson cosigned an amicus curiae brief for "Intellectual Property Professors" in support of Star Athletica in Star Athletica v. Varsity Brands.

Awards and honors