Dean Chris Guthrie has announced the appointment of Joseph Fishman as an assistant professor of law at Vanderbilt Law School.
Fishman, whose teaching and scholarship focus on copyright law, joins Vanderbilt’s law faculty after serving for two years as a Climenko Fellow and lecturer in law at Harvard Law School.
A native of Boston, Professor Fishman earned his A.B. magna cum laude from Harvard College with a joint major in music and religion and an M.Phil. in musicology from the University of Cambridge before earning his J.D. at Harvard Law School. His scholarly work currently focuses on how laws designed to protect intellectual property, such as copyright law, constrain and support creativity and the creative process. His most recent article, “Creating Around Copyright,” published in the Harvard Law Review, examines copyright restrictions’ underappreciated upside for stimulating creativity among those who need to work around them. His 2014 article, “Copyright Infringement and the Separated Powers of Moral Entrepreneurship,” published in the American Criminal Law Review, was awarded a sponsorship scholarship grant from the University of Houston Law Center’s Institute for Intellectual Property and Information Law.
“Joe Fishman is a bright young scholar whose current work examines the relationship between the creative process and the copyright process,” Dean Guthrie said. “It’s a pleasure to welcome Joe to our faculty.”
After law school, Fishman was a law clerk for Judge Jeffrey R. Howard of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and for Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. He then worked as an associate at Jenner & Block, practicing in the firm’s content, media and entertainment group, where he specialized in litigation involving the music industry, before entering the legal academy.
At Vanderbilt, Professor Fishman will teach Copyright Law and the Music and Copyright Seminar. He is affiliated with Vanderbilt’s Intellectual Property Program.