Translated by DeepL
Jane C. Ginsburg is one of the world’s leading experts in intellectual property law, particularly copyright law, international copyright law, trademark law, and private international law as it applies to works.
The presentation of the honorary doctorate from ULiège, followed by a lecture by Jane C. Ginsburg, will take place on May 11, 2027 as part of the “ : ULiège’s Major Academic Lectures .”
A professor at Columbia Law School, where she holds the Morton L. Janklow Professorship in Literary and Artistic Property Law, she is also the academic director of the Kernochan Center for Law, Media, and the Arts, a center dedicated to legal issues related to creativity, media, cultural industries, and the arts.
Her academic career is characterized by a dual American and European background, which has greatly enriched her scholarly work. Jane C. Ginsburg is a graduate of the University of Chicago, where she earned a B.A. in 1976 and an M.A. in 1977, and of Harvard Law School, where she earned her Juris Doctor in 1980. She then pursued legal studies in France, earning a D.E.A. from the University of Paris II in 1985, followed by a doctorate in law from the same university in 1995. This education on both sides of the Atlantic accounts for the comparative nature of her research, which bridges Anglo-American copyright law, European copyright law, and international instruments for the protection of works.
Jane C. Ginsburg’s scholarly contributions are considerable. Her work focuses on the foundations of copyright law, creators’ rights, the tensions between the protection of works and freedom of expression, digital uses, related rights, exceptions and limitations, as well as conflicts of jurisdiction in transnational intellectual property disputes. She is the author or co-author of books and reference manuals.
In contrast to a strictly economic or industrial conception of intellectual property, Jane C. Ginsburg emphasizes the link between creation, personality, attribution, liability, and the circulation of works. This focus is particularly evident in her recent research on generative artificial intelligence. She examines the history and doctrine of copyright law to argue that U.S. law remains grounded in a humanistic conception of authorship: protection can be granted to an AI-generated work only if human intervention played a decisive role in the work’s creation.
This reflection on AI is part of a broader body of work on the technological transformations of copyright. In her work on copyright and the transformations of creation, Jane C. Ginsburg situates copyright within a fundamental tension: encouraging creativity and ensuring fair recognition for creators, while also preserving the circulation of works, access to knowledge, and freedom of expression. Her research thus sheds light on the legal conditions necessary to strike a balance between the protection of authors, technological innovation, educational uses, cultural industries, and the public interest.
Her international standing is attested to by numerous positions and distinctions. She has taught or served as a visiting professor at universities in France, Italy, Australia, the United Kingdom, Israel, New Zealand, and Singapore. She is vice president of the International Literary and Artistic Association and president of its American branch, underscoring her role in international debates on authors’ rights. She also served as co-rapporteur for the American Law Institute’s project on the principles of private international law relating to intellectual property.
Jane C. Ginsburg was elected an International Fellow of the British Academy in 2011, in the field of law, for her work in intellectual property, trademark law, and private international law. She is also a member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Foreign Fellow of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in Rome, and an Honorary Fellow of Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge. In 2008, she was inducted into the IP Hall of Fame.
Jane C. Ginsburg’s work sheds light on issues that are equally essential for universities: intellectual creation, the protection of authors, access to knowledge, the status of works in the digital age, and now the effects of generative artificial intelligence on the very concept of authorship. The proposal to confer upon her the title of Doctor honoris causa is thus fully justified: it would honor a world-class legal scholar whose work contributes to the understanding of the legal, ethical, and humanistic conditions of creation in contemporary societies, and whose influence extends far beyond the field of law alone to address the fundamental issues of culture, science, and democracy.
Sources
- Columbia Law School
- The British Academy
- Jane C. Ginsburg, “Humanist Copyright,” 6 J. Free Speech L. 91 (2025).
- “Jane C. Ginsburg, intellectual property expert: We are not ready to accept the idea of the machine being the author,” El País, April 2, 2024.
