Jennifer Jenkins

Jennifer Jenkins is a Clinical Professor of Law teaching intellectual property and Director of Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, where she heads its Arts Project – a project analyzing the effects of intellectual property on cultural production, and writes its annual Public Domain Day website. She is the co-author (with James Boyle) of the open coursebook Intellectual Property: Cases and Materials (5th ed, 2021) and two comic books — Theft! A History of Music, a 2000-year history of musical borrowing and regulation, and Bound By Law?, a comic book about copyright, fair use and documentary film. Her articles include Mark of the Devil: The University as Brand Bully (with James Boyle), In Ambiguous Battle: The Promise (and Pathos) of Public Domain Day and Last Sale? Libraries’ Rights in the Digital Age. Her upcoming publications include a book on Music Copyright, Creativity, and Culture (forthcoming from Oxford University Press).

She has been widely quoted on intellectual property matters in publications such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, LA Times, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, andThe Guardian. Her radio and TV appearances include segments on Planet Money, CBS This Morning, and NPR’s Weekend Edition, Morning Edition, and Marketplace. While in practice, she was a member of the team that defended the copyright infringement suit against the publisher of the novel The Wind Done Gone (a parodic rejoinder to Gone with the Wind) in SunTrust v. Houghton Mifflin. While a student at Duke, she also co-authored, filmed, and edited “Nuestra Hernandez,” a video addressing copyright, appropriation, and culture. Jenkins received her B.A. in English from Rice University, her J.D. from Duke Law School, and her M.A. in English from Duke University.