Antitrust Law and Intellectual Property Rights ─ Cases and Materials

In Antitrust Law and Intellectual Property Rights: Cases and Materials, Christopher R. Leslie describes how patents, copyrights, and trademarks confer exclusionary rights on their owners, and how firms sometimes exercise this exclusionary power in ways that exceed the legitimate bounds of their intellectual property rights. Leslie explains that while substantive intellectual property law defines the scope of the exclusionary rights, antitrust law often provides the most important consequences when owners of intellectual property misuse their rights in a way that harms consumers or illegitimately excludes competitors. Antitrust law defines the limits of what intellectual property owners can do with their IP rights. In this book, Leslie explores what conduct firms can and cannot engage in while acquiring and exploiting their intellectual property rights, and surveys those aspects of antitrust law that are necessary for both antitrust practitioners and intellectual property attorneys to understand. This book is ideal for an advanced antitrust course in a JD program. In addition to building on basic antitrust concepts, it fills in a gap that is often missing in basic antitrust courses yet critical for an intellectual property lawyer: the intersection of intellectual property and antitrust law. The relationship between intellectual property and antitrust is particularly valuable as an increasing number of law schools offer specializations and LLMs in intellectual property. This book also provides meaningful material for both undergraduate and graduate business schools programs because it explains how antitrust law limits the marshalling of intellectual property rights.

Christopher R. Leslie is a Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. He has been a Visiting Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, the University of Texas School of Law, and N.Y.U. School of Law. Professor Leslie's scholarship has appeared in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the California Law Review, Texas Law Review, the UCLA Law Review, the Iowa Law Review, the Minnesota Law Review, and the William & Mary Law Review, among others. He is a co-author on the leading treatise on the intersection of antitrust law and intellectual property rights, IP AND ANTITRUST: AN ANALYSIS OF ANTITRUST PRINCIPLES APPLIED TO INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY (2d. ed. 2009) (co-author with Herbert Hovenkamp, Mark D. Janis & Mark A. Lemley). Professor Leslie graduated from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, where he served as an editor on the California Law Review and was elected to the Order of the Coif. He also earned a Master's in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and has a degree in economics and political science from U.C.L.A. Before entering the academy, Professor Leslie clerked for Judge Diarmuid O'Scannlain on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and practiced law at two large San Francisco law firms, concentrating on antitrust and complex business litigation. Professor Leslie is also the past Chair of the Antitrust Law Section of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) and is an editor for the Antitrust Law Journal.