Law & Humanities Workshop Series
Robert Spoo
University of Tulsa College of Law and Dept. of English
Courtesy of the Trade in 19-th Century American Publishing:
Social Norms and the Copyright Vacuum for Works Published Abroad
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
12:30 – 2:00
Solarium (room FA2), Falconer Hall
84 Queen's Park
Professor Spoo earned his J.D. from the Yale Law School, where he was Executive Editor of the Yale Law Journal and received the Michael Egger Prize for best student publication on current social problems in volume 108 of the Yale Law Journal. After graduating, he served as law clerk for the Honorable Sonia Sotomayor of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and practiced for several years with law firms in New York, Oklahoma, and San Francisco, providing litigation services and advice in the areas of copyrights, trademarks, and other intellectual property. As an attorney, Professor Spoo has represented authors, scholars, documentary filmmakers, record companies, and other creators and users of intellectual property. His litigation work has included serving as co-counsel, with the Stanford Center for Internet & Society, for Professor Carol Shloss of Stanford against the Estate of James Joyce. In 2005, he was asked to travel to Vietnam to advise the Ministry of Education and Training on issues of intellectual property and higher education. Prior to his legal career, Professor Spoo received his M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Princeton University and taught for more than ten years as a tenured faculty member in the English Department at the University of Tulsa, where he was also Editor of the James Joyce Quarterly. He has published numerous books and articles on James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and other modern literary figures. His teaching interests include copyrights and intellectual property, media and entertainment law, law and literature, and contracts. His recent research has focused on the intersection of intellectual property, modernist literature, and the copyright-related needs of scholars. Professor Spoo is a member of the Modernist Studies Association Task Force on Fair Use, serves as copyright advisor to numerous academic journals and projects, and acts as general counsel for the International James Joyce Foundation. In June 2008, he received the Lucia R. Briggs Distinguished Achievement Award for "outstanding contributions and achievements in a career field," from his undergraduate institution, Lawrence University.
A light lunch will be provided.
Co-sponsored by the CILP Innovation Law & Policy Workshop Series.
For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.
