Professor of Law
Laura Pedraza-Fariña is a Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law where she teaches patent law, international intellectual property law, and innovation theory. Her research falls into two main areas: innovation law and policy, and international organizations (IOs)—with an emphasis on those organizations that address global health and intellectual property concerns. Using the mixed methods of network science, science and technology studies (STS), and history of science, Professor Pedraza-Fariña's scholarship on innovation law has developed a sociologically informed approach to intellectual property (IP). This approach focuses on the ways in which on-the-ground social norms interact with intellectual property regimes to influence the direction of both technical and artistic knowledge. Her scholarship on international organizations focuses on understanding how IOs with overlapping regulatory domains both compete and coordinate with each other to shape international laws and norms. She is particularly interested in understanding the role of internal institutional expert culture in inter-institutional competition and cooperation. Her subject-matter focus is on those IOs at the intersection of intellectual property law and health: the World Trade Organization, the World Health Organization, and the World Intellectual Property Organization.
Professor Pedraza-Fariña received her J.D. from Harvard Law School, her Ph.D. in Genetics from Yale University, and her B.A. in Chemistry from Oberlin College. After law school, Professor Pedraza-Fariña was an associate at Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C., focusing on pharmaceutical patent litigation.
Her research has been published or is forthcoming in the Iowa Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, and Notre Dame Law Review, among others.
Bibliography
-
Publications
- Covid-19 as a Complex Disease: Implications for Interdisciplinary Collaboration, in Intellectual Property, COVID-19, and the next Pandemic: Diagnosing Problems, Developing Cures (edited by Haochen Sun & Madhavi Sunder, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2024).
- Amgen v. Sanofi and the Return of Patent Formalism to the Supreme Court, 23 Chi. Kent J. Intell. Prop. 162 (2023). Full Text
- How Do Patents Influence Cumulative Innovation?, JOTWELL (January 24,2023). (reviewing Janet Freilich & Sepehr Shahshahani, Measuring Follow-On Innovation (Feb. 20, 2022), available at SSRN) Full Text
- The Sociology and Psychology of Innovation: A Synthesis and Research Agenda for Intellectual Property Scholars, 60 Hous. L. Rev. 261 (2022). (symposium issue, with Stephanie Plamondon Bair). Full Text
- The Ghost in the Patent System: An Empirical Study of Patent Law’s Elusive “Ordinary Artisan,” (with Ryan Whalen), 108 Iowa L. Rev. 247 (2022). Full Text
- The Intellectual Property Turn in Global Health, 36 OSIRIS 241 (2021). Full Text
- Impacts of Pharmaceutical Capture on Public Health Outcomes, JOTWELL (November 12, 2021). (reviewing Liza Vertinsky, Pharmaceutical (Re)Capture, 20 Yale J. Health Pol’y L. & Ethics (2021). Full Text
- Rediscovering Patents’ and Copyrights’ Common Origins Story, JOTWELL (October 20, 2020). (reviewing Joseph Fishman, Originality’s Other Path, 109 Cal. L. Rev. 861 (2021), available at SSRN).
Full Text - A Network Theory of Patentability (with Ryan Whalen), 87 U. Chi. L. Rev. 63 (2020). Full Text
- Anti-Innovation Norms (with Stephanie Plamondon Bair), 112 Northwest. Univ. Law Rev. 1069 (2018). Full Text
- The Social Origins of Innovation Failures, 70 SMU L. Rev. 377 (2017). Full Text
- Spill Your (Trade) Secrets: Knowledge Networks as Innovation Drivers, 92 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1561 (2017). Full Text
- Constructing Interdisciplinary Collaboration: The Oncofertility Consortium as an Emerging Knowledge Commons, in Governing Medical Research Commons (edited by Brett Frischmann, Michael Madison, Katherine Strandburg, Cambridge University Press, 2017). Full Text
- Understanding the Federal Circuit: A Model of Expert Decision-Making, 30 Berkeley Technology Law Journal 89 (2015). Full Text
- Patent Law and the Sociology of Innovation, 2013 Wis. L. Rev. 813 (2013). Full Text
- Conceptions of Civil Society in International Law-Making and Implementation: A Theoretical Framework, 34 Mich. J. Int. Law 605 (2013). Full Text
- (with Spring Miller and James Cavallaro), in No Place to Hide: Gang, State and Clandestine Violence in El Salvador (Harvard University Press, 2010). Full Text
- (with Miguel Orozco), in HIV/AIDS Policy in Nicaragua: A Civil Society Perspective (2008). (Open Society Foundations) (policy report). Full Text
-
Works In Progress
- Access to Medicines in a Changing Institutional World. (with Karen Alter).
- Polycentric Healthcare Innovation. (with Wendy Epstein)
- Misaligned Private-Public Interests in Administrative Patent Litigation. (with Álvaro Cures Domínguez and Ryan Whalen).
- Ex-Post Patent Strength to Innovation Diffusion.
- Problem-Finding Innovation.
-
Scientific Publications
- High-resolution infrared spectra of the two nonpolar isomers of 1,4-difluorobutadiene (with Norman C. Craig, et al.), 254 Journal of Molecular Spectroscopy 39 (2009).
- Oncogenic cooperation in tumor initiation and metastasis, 79 Yale Journal of Biology & Medicine 95 (2006).
- Drosophila Src-family kinases function with Csk to regulate cell proliferation and apoptosis, 23 Oncogene 4754 (2004).
- The tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC) pathway and mechanism of size control (with Christopher J. Potter, et al.), 31 Biochemical Society Transactions 584 (2003).
- Akt regulates growth by directly phosphorylating Tsc2 (with Christopher J. Potter & Tian Xu), 4 Nature Cell Biology 658 (2002).
- Vibrational spectroscopy of the three isomers of 1,4-difluorobutadiene (with Norman C. Craig, et al.), 103 Journal of Physical Chemistry 6726 (1999).