Sean Seymore has returned to the Vanderbilt Law faculty as the Centennial Professor of Law. Seymore is an expert in patent law whose research focuses on how patent law and policy should evolve in response to advances in science and technology.
Seymore’s appointment was announced by Chris Guthrie, Dean and John Wade-Kent Syverud Professor of Law.
Seymore’s research has been published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, Washington University Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, and the Notre Dame Law Review, among others. Seymore has forthcoming articles in the Boston University Law Review (2022) and the Duke Law Journal (2023).
At Vanderbilt he will be affiliated with the Vanderbilt Intellectual Property Program and teach Torts, Patent Law, Evidence, Remedies and Trade Secrets.
“I am glad to welcome Sean Seymore back to Vanderbilt and look forward to his continued contributions to patent law scholarship and to the VLS and Vanderbilt University communities,” Guthrie said.
Seymore taught at Notre Dame Law School in 2021-22 as the John P. Murphy Foundation Professor of Law. He had previously served on Vanderbilt Law faculty from 2010 to 2021, holding the New York Alumni Chancellor’s Chair in Law from 2019 to 2021.
Before joining Vanderbilt, Seymore taught at Washington & Lee University School of Law, where he was an assistant professor of law and earned the designations of Alumni Faculty Fellow and Huss Faculty Fellow for his scholarship and teaching. In 2007-08 Seymore was a visiting assistant professor at Northwestern University School of Law. He is an elected member of the American Law Institute.
Before earning his J.D. and entering the legal academy, Seymore held academic appointments in chemistry at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and Rowan University and was a visiting scientist at Indiana University, Bloomington. After earning his law degree, he practiced patent law with Foley Hoag in Boston. He is an active member of the American Chemical Society (ACS) and served on the executive committee for the Division of Chemistry and the Law from 2009 to 2012, on the Committee on Patents and Related Matters from 2006-07 and on the Younger Chemists Committee from 2002 to 2006.
Seymore was a Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Associate Profess appointed to the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in spring 2012.
He earned his B.S. in chemistry at the University of Tennessee as a Tennessee Scholar, an M.S.Chem. (with thesis) from the Georgia Institute of Technology, a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Notre Dame with an Arthur J. Schmitt Presidential Fellowship, and a J.D. from the University of Notre Dame with an Allen Endowment Fellowship. His dissertation, Polar Effects in Metal-Mediated Nitrogen and Oxygen Atom Transfer, led to four peer-reviewed publications in Inorganic Chemistry, including a cover article.
Seymore was appointed the law school’s first Enterprise Scholar in fall 2013 and to the inaugural cohort of Vanderbilt Chancellor Faculty Fellows in 2015.
