Sean Seymore, a professor of law, professor of chemistry and Chancellor’s Faculty Fellow at Vanderbilt University, has been elected to membership in the American Law Institute. ALI is the leading independent organization in the United States producing scholarly work to clarify, modernize and otherwise improve the law.
Its members, who include practitioners and academics, apply their areas of expertise to ALI projects, which include Restatements of the Law, model statutes and principles of the law. These publications are influential in American courts and state legislatures and in legal scholarship and education.
Professor Seymore joined Vanderbilt’s law faculty in 2010, having previously 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. He was a visiting assistant professor at Northwestern University School of Law in 2007-08. Before law school, Professor 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.
His current research focuses on how patent law should evolve in response to scientific advances and how the intersection of law and science should influence the formulation of public policy. As an active member of the American Chemical Society (ACS), he 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. In spring 2012, Professor Seymore was appointed to the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Associate Professor.
Professor Seymore earned a B.S. in chemistry from 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 (see several novel compounds he synthesized), led to four peer-reviewed publications in Inorganic Chemistry, including a cover article.
Professor Seymore serves as the faculty adviser to the Vanderbilt Law Review. He was appointed the law school’s first Enterprise Scholar in fall 2013 and is in the inaugural cohort of Chancellor Faculty Fellows.