50th Anniversary Distinguished Lecture: The Theory and Methods of Legal Futurism

Date: January 10, 2019 (Thursday)
Time: 6:30pm – 7:30pm
Venue: Academic Conference Room, 11/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower, the University of Hong Kong

Speaker: Professor Barton Beebe (John M. Desmarais Professor of Intellectual Property Law & Co-Director, Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy, New York University School of Law)

Abstract: So much of current legal thinking and policymaking is directed toward the future and future technologies, such as artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, and new surveillance technologies. In law as in other areas of the social sciences, we have well-developed methods of talking about the past, of documenting and analyzing history. What we lack are such methods of talking about the future. This presentation will draw upon other fields of forecasting to ask: What is the history of how legal thinkers have talked about the future? What characterizes how they currently do so? And how should they talk about the future?

About the speaker: Barton Beebe is the John M. Desmarais Professor of Intellectual Property Law at NYU School of Law. He has been the Anne Urowsky Visiting Professor of Law at Yale Law School, a Visiting Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, and a Visiting Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford. He has also taught courses at the Center for International Intellectual Property Studies at the University of Strasbourg; the Munich Intellectual Property Law Center; the State Intellectual Property Office of the People’s Republic of China; the Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki, Finland; and Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He is the author of Trademark Law: An Open-Source Casebook, which is a free online trademark casebook now in use in over fifty law schools around the world.

All are welcome!