2025 Blaine Sloan Lecture on International Law

Progress and Progressive Intellectual Property Treaties: New Issues, New Actors

Delivered by Professor Ruth L. Okediji, Jeremiah Smith, Jr.,Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

Professor Okediji’s lecture will focus on how The Intellectual Property (IP) Clause of the U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to grant exclusive rights to authors and inventors to promote scientific and cultural progress. But some of the most important developments in intellectual property law in the twenty-first century derive from international treaty-making processes that attempt to include diverse interests, peoples, and communities in the global innovation system. This lecture explores the rise of progressive IP treaties that are responsive to the interests of creators and inventors such as Indigenous People, local communities, and other non-traditional actors. It highlights tensions and tradeoffs between contemporary views of the IP Clause and the political economy of international IP law-making that has drawn new actors to the global bargaining table, with surprising results for U.S. IP law and politics.

About Professor Ruth L. Okediji

Image

Ruth L. Okediji is the Jeremiah Smith Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and Co-Director of Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. Professor Okediji teaches contracts, international intellectual property (IP), patents, copyright, Biblical Law, and courses on Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Professor Okediji’s research and scholarship examine innovation policy, the digital economy, and global knowledge governance. She advises governments and international organizations on a variety of issues at the intersection of IP, international economic law, and human development. She is widely cited for her scholarship on the design and implementation of IP norms in developing and least-developed countries and for her pathbreaking work on legal regimes related to Indigenous People’s knowledge. She has served as a policy advisor to inter-governmental organizations, regional economic communities, and national governments on the formulation of IP and trade policies, digital technologies, and AI regulation.

Professor Okediji was a lead expert negotiator at the Diplomatic Conference for the 2013 WIPO Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Work and for the 2024 WIPO Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge (GRATK). She served by appointment of the Secretary General on the United Nations High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines, and she was a member of the U.S. National Academies Board on Science, Technology and Policy Committee on the Impact of Copyright Policy on Innovation in the Digital Era. In 2021, she completed service as Co-Chair of the National Academies Board on Science, Technology, and Economic Policy Committee on Advancing Commercialization from the Federal Laboratories.

Over the course of her career, Professor Okediji has received awards and distinctions for teaching, advising, and mentoring. These include “Professor Most Likely to Go Beyond the Call of Duty,” the Student Bar Association’s “Outstanding Professor Award,” and at Harvard, she is a two- time recipient of the Harvard Law School’s Women’s Law Association “Shatter the Ceiling” Award.

Professor Okediji has authored an extensive array of articles, commissioned papers, and book chapters on the relationship between intellectual property, multilateral trade, and human development. She serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of World Intellectual Property Law and the Journal of International Economic Law. She is the immediate past- President of the Order of the Coif, an elected member of the American Law Institute, and an appointed member of the American Bar Association’s Presidential Taskforce on Artificial Intelligence and the Law.

Professor Okediji was named one of the 50 most influential figures in IP by Managing IP and received the 2019 Public Knowledge IP3 Award. She is a 2023 recipient of the Barry Prize for Distinguished Intellectual Achievement from the American Academy of Sciences and Letters, and a 2024 Herchel Smith Fellow at the University of Cambridge, England. Her latest book, Traditional Knowledge and Modern Justice, is forthcoming in 2026.

About the Blaine Sloan Lecture on International Law

The Blaine Sloan Lecture on International Law honors F. Blaine Sloan for developing the international law studies program at Pace. A member of the United Nations Legal Office for three decades and Director of the General Legal Division, Professor Sloan has contributed significantly to the development of private and public international law. He represented the Secretary General at the 1978 UN Conference on the Carriage of Goods by Sea; at the sessions from 1969–1978 of the UN Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL); and at the 1966–1978 sessions of the Legal Sub-Committee on the Peaceful uses of Outer Space. His UN service involved him in the organization’s work on Vietnam, relief for Palestinian refugees, peacekeeping in the Middle East, the UN Commission on Korea, and as Legal Advisor to Security Council sessions in Africa and Latin America.

This event is free and open to the public. Please register below.

This is an in person event. 1 PD credit will be awarded to students who attend.