Sovereignty Without Territory: Indigenous Peoples, Genetic Resources, and the Future of Global Intellectual Property Law

For centuries, international intellectual property (IP) law has rested on a foundational premise: sovereignty over knowledge and biological resources is exercised exclusively through states and bounded by territory. That premise is now under pressure from two directions at once. The WIPO Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge, adopted in 2024, introduces a mandatory disclosure-of-origin requirement into patent law itself — though its slow path to ratification is its own evidence of how contested this shift remains. Meanwhile, the Agreement on Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction, which entered into force in January 2026, extends a benefit-sharing framework to marine genetic resources in waters no state owns at all. Together, these instruments signal a reconfiguration of sovereignty, and a resurfacing of one of the oldest problems in resource governance: who has the authority to manage what belongs to no one and everyone at once.

This lecture argues that Indigenous peoples have been central to that reconfiguration, and that their claims sit in productive tension with classical commons governance. The tragedy-of-the-commons framework treats ungoverned shared resources as a coordination failure to be solved through property rights, state regulation, or Ostrom-style polycentric management among users. Indigenous advocacy for prior informed consent, disclosure of origin, and equitable benefit-sharing offers a different answer: not a commons that needs an owner, but a resource that carries standing obligations regardless of who claims to own it. What Indigenous communities have advanced is sovereignty without territory, namely authority grounded in stewardship, relational obligation, and accountability to past and future generations, exercised without reference to the boundaries that both state sovereignty and conventional commons theory assume.

What is emerging, this lecture contends, is an alternative architecture of governance — one that tests the limits of what states can claim to control. By examining treaty language, ratification practice, and Indigenous governance models, the lecture asks whether international IP law will recognize layered and overlapping forms of authority that sit alongside — and sometimes within — state sovereignty. It concludes by reflecting on the doctrinal implications of this shift for global IP law, biodiversity governance, and the evolving landscape of Indigenous self-determination.

The late Curtis B. Kellar ’40, established the Horatio Ellsworth Kellar Distinguished Visitors Program in memory of his father in 1996. This interdisciplinary lecture series at the Law School connects emerging issues in the law with other disciplines. Mr. Curtis Kellar served on the Board of Directors of the Law Alumni Association and the Board of Visitors of the Law School, retiring in 1981 as an Associate General Counsel of Mobil Oil Corp.

About the Speaker

Ruth L. Okediji is the Jeremiah Smith, Jr., Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and Co-Director of Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. She teaches contracts, international intellectual property, legal ethics, and courses in Biblical Law.

Professor Okediji's research focuses on innovation policy, the digital economy, and global technology regulation, with particular attention to intellectual property norms in developing countries and legal regimes governing Indigenous Peoples' knowledge. She is widely cited for her scholarship on the design and implementation of IP norms in developing and least-developed countries consistent with human flourishing and for her pathbreaking work on legal regimes to serve innovation needs in under-resourced communities.

Professor Okediji serves 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.

She has served as lead expert and negotiator for the 2013 WIPO Marrakesh Treaty and the 2024 WIPO Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge, as a member of the United Nations High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines and as a member of National Academies committees on copyright policy and the commercialization of innovation from United States federal laboratories, co-chairing the latter.

Professor Okediji is immediate past-President of the Order of the Coif, an elected member of the American Law Institute, and a member of the American Bar Association's Presidential Taskforce on Artificial Intelligence and the Law. Her honors include recognition among Managing IP's 50 most influential figures in intellectual property, the Public Knowledge IP3 Award, the Barry Prize for Distinguished Intellectual Achievement, and two Harvard Women's Law Association "Shatter the Ceiling" Awards.

She is a graduate of the University of Jos and Harvard Law School. Her next book, Technology, Theology and the Soul of Human Development, is forthcoming in 2028.