Ben Depoorter, Professor of Law

Ben Depoorter is a graduate of Yale Law School. He also holds a JD (1999) and PhD (2003) from Ghent University and a Master's degree from the University of Hamburg (2001). He completed his studies at Yale Law School (2003) on a full scholarship from the Belgian American Educational Foundation (BAEF). As an Oscar Cox Fellow at Yale, Depoorter served as an editor of the of the Yale Journal of Regulation and conducted research as a John M. Olin Fellow in Law, Economics, and Public Policy. He was a Santander Research Fellow at U.C. Berkeley and a recipient of a Fulbright scholarship. He was a visiting researcher at the Berkeley Center for Intellectual Property Law & Technology at U.C. Berkeley and at Stanford Law School. He received the Roger Traynor scholarship prize at U.C. Hastings in 2011.

Professor Depoorter's scholarly interests include property law, litigation theory, and intellectual property law, with an emphasis on behavioral research and issues involving new technologies.

His recent and forthcoming articles include "Fair Trespass", 111 Columbia Law Review, (forthcoming 2011); "Copyright Backlash", 84 University of Southern California Law Review (forthcoming, 2011); "Law in the Shadow Bargaining: The Feedback Effect of Civil Settlements", 95 Cornell Law Review 957 (2010);  "Technology & Uncertainty: The Shaping Effect on Copyright Law", 157 the University of Pennsylvania Law Review 1830 (2010), and "Horizontal Political Externalities: the Supply and Demand of Disaster Management", 56 Duke Law Journal 101 (2006).

His interdsiciplnary work on anticommons property theory is widely cited in American law reviews and international peer-reviewed journals and was featured in 2010 in the New Yorker magazine.  These writings include "Fragmentation in Property: Towards a General Model" (with F. Parisi and N. Schulz), 159 Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 594 (2003); "Duality in Property: Commons and Anticommons" (with F. Parisi & N. Schulz), 25 (4) International Review of Law & Economics 578 (2006); "Fragmentation of Property Rights: A Functional Explanation of Servitude Law" (with F. Parisi), 3 (1) Global Jurist Frontiers, Article 2 (2003); "Never Two Without Three: Commons, Anticommons and Semicommons", 5 Review of Law & Economics, issue 1 (2009) (w/Jef De Mot and Enrico Bertachinni); "Fair Use and Copyright Protection: A Price Theory Explanation" (with F. Parisi), 21 (4) Review of Law & Economics, 453 (2003).

Professor Depoorter has presented his writings widely, including at the Berkeley Center for Intellectual Property & Technology seminar , Yale Law School Olin workshop series, Stanford University's Intellectual Property Law Conference, the American Association of Law & Economics Conference, Washington University's Center for Law, Innovation & Economic Growth and at conferences and seminars at Boston College Law School, Boston University Law School, the University of Connecticut School of Law, Duke Law School, George Mason Law School, Northwestern University School of Law, the University of Pennsylvania Law School, University of Texas School of Law, University of Toronto Law School, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign College of Law, and Yale Law School.

Professor Depoorter has been a visiting professor at Boston University School of Law, Duke Law School, and Haifa University.

Courses Taught: Property Law, Law and Economics, Advanced Copyright Seminar, Intellectual Property, Antitrust Law, Comparative Law.