Brett Frischmann

The Charles Widger Endowed University Professor in Law, Business and Economics

Biography

Brett Frischmann joined Villanova as The Charles Widger Endowed University Professor in Law, Business and Economics, in 2017. In this role, Frischmann promotes cross-campus research, programming and collaboration; fosters high-visibility academic pursuits at the national and international levels; has the ability to teach across the University; and will position Villanova as a thought leader and innovator at the intersection of law, business and economics.

A renowned scholar in intellectual property and Internet law, Frischmann came to Villanova from Cardozo Law School at Yeshiva University, where he was director of the Cardozo Intellectual Property and Information Law Program (2011-2016) and a professor of law. He is an affiliated scholar of the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, an affiliated faculty member of the Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University, and a trustee for the Nexa Center for Internet & Society, Politecnico di Torino. Frischmann most recently served as the Microsoft Visiting Professor of Information and Technology Policy at Princeton University’s Center for Information and Technology Policy.

Frischmann’s work has appeared in leading scholarly publications, including Columbia Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Journal of Institutional Economics, Journal of Economic Perspectives, University of Chicago Law Review, and Review of Law and Economics, among others. His latest book, co-authored with philosopher Evan Selinger, Re-Engineering Humanity (Cambridge University Press), examines techno-social engineering of humans, various ‘creep’ phenomena and modern techno-driven Taylorism. Frischmann’s books on the relationships between infrastructural resources, governance, commons and spillovers include Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources (Oxford University Press, 2012); Governing Knowledge Commons (Oxford University Press, 2014, with Michael Madison and Katherine Strandburg); and Governing Medical Knowledge Commons (Cambridge University Press, 2017, with Michael Madison and Katherine Strandburg). In addition, he has written a number of online articles on the intersection of technology and humanity for Scientific American.

Prior to his appointment at Cardozo Law, Frischmann was on the faculty of the Loyola University Chicago, School of Law from 2002 to 2010. He also has served as a visiting professor at numerous institutions, including Columbia Law School, Cornell Law School, Duke Law School, Fordham University School of Law and Syracuse University College of Law. 

Practice Experience

• Judicial Clerk for the Hon. Fred I. Parker, U.S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit
• Associate, Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering (Washington, D.C.); Practice Areas: Communications, E-commerce, Intellectual Property, International Environmental Law