Lawyers at Work by Clare Cosslett

Author:Clare Cosslett
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781430245032
Publisher: Apress

CHAPTER

9

Chris Sprigman

Professor

University of Virginia School of Law

Imagine a job where you spend your days teaching, writing, and thinking about the legal issues posed by red-soled shoes, stand-up comedy routines, and football plays. Christopher Jon Sprigman—a law professor specializing in the study of the effects of legal rules on innovation and the deployment of new technologies—has that enviable job. He finds that creativity in such intensely innovative and imitative industries as fashion, music, sports, entertainment, cuisine, and open-source software tends to thrive best where intellectual property protection is least stringent.

Sprigman’s own career exemplifies the creative freedom he studies. As he moved from the United States to South Africa and back, and from law firm associate to high-flying law firm partner to basement-dwelling junior legal scholar to tenured professor at one of the country’s most prestigious law schools, he kept in mind the advice from a federal judge about the false allure of biglaw and the importance of charting his own path. To this career advice, Sprigman added his own self-admonitions: resist getting carried along with a tide that might cough you up on the rocks; and never invest so much of yourself in tokens of high status as to be unwilling to throw them away in order to pursue a more intellectually challenging direction.

Sprigman is the Class of 1963 Research Professor in Honor of Graham C. Lilly and Peter W. Low at the University of Virginia School of Law. After receiving his BA from the University of Pennsylvania and his JD from the University of Chicago Law School, he clerked for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He spent three years working on antitrust cases for Davis Polk in New York before moving to South Africa to become a visiting professor at the University of the Witwatersrand School of Law—while at the same time clerking for Justice Lourens H. W. Ackermann of the Constitutional Court of South Africa.

Sprigman served as appellate counsel in the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice, where he worked on US v. Microsoft. After he was promoted to partner at the King & Spalding office in Washington, DC, he left practice to become a residential fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. He has published extensively in the area of popular culture and intellectual property, including a book, The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation (Oxford University Press, 2012), coauthored with Kal Raustiala.

Clare Cosslett: Why did you go to law school?

Chris Sprigman: When I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, I considered a couple of things. I thought of getting a PhD in history and I thought of going to work for a newspaper. I had worked on the school newspaper at Penn and liked it a lot. While there were different ways that I was thinking about starting my career, it boiled down to the fact that Chicago gave me money and it wouldn’t cost much to go to law school. It actually cost very, very little.

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