Director
Jorge Contreras
Director
Program on Intellectual Property and Technology Law, University of Utah
Biography
Jorge L. Contreras is the James T. Jensen Endowed Professor for Transactional Law and Director of the Program on Intellectual Property and Technology Law at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law, and was a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science during 2023. Prior to entering academia, Professor Contreras was a partner at the international law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP where he practiced intellectual property transactional law in Boston, Washington DC and London. Prof. Contreras’s academic research focuses on intellectual property, antitrust law, technical standardization and science policy. He has published more than 150 academic articles and book chapters and has written or edited twelve books including the 2-volume Cambridge Handbook of Technical Standardization Law (NY: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2017, 2019). His scholarship has received numerous awards and recognition, including the Patent & Trademark Office Society’s 2021 Rossman Memorial Award and the University of Utah’s 2020 Distinguished Research Award. Professor Contreras has appeared before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, the Federal Trade Commission and the European Commission, and as an expert witness before courts across North America, South America and Europe. His book, The Genome Defense: Inside the Epic Legal Battle to Determine Who Owns Your DNA, was recognized by the NY Times as one of the top nonfiction books of Fall 2021 and selected as the Best Patent Law Book of the Year by the UK-based IPKat blog. He is an elected member of the American Law Institute and the former co-chair of the National Conference of Lawyers and Scientists. He received his JD from Harvard Law School, earned his BSEE and BA in English at Rice University and clerked for Chief Justice Thomas R. Philips of the Texas Supreme Court.