When COVID-19 began upending the world in late 2019, Sapna Kumar knew what to do. The Henry J. Fletcher Professor of Law called upon her diverse intellectual property and administrative law background, as well as what she’d learned as a faculty fellow with Duke University Law School’s Center for Genome Ethics Law & Policy. Her resulting research would help inform future policymaking and make a significant impact on social welfare.
“I’d always had some interest in patents and public health, but with the pandemic breaking out, public health was all I could think about. How would we use the existing patent system to give flexibility to countries that increasingly needed drug supplies and access to vaccines?” she asked. She co-authored “Contractual Solutions to Overcome Drug Scarcity During Pandemics and Epidemics” (with Ana Santos Rutschman) in Nature Biotechnology and a follow-up book chapter in Intellectual Property, COVID-19, and the Next Pandemic: Diagnosing Problems, Developing Cures, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. But the work is not done.
“It’s something I’ll keep circling back to,” she says. “That’s the fun thing about being an academic — you can have several areas to play around in and then be able to make contributions when something comes to the forefront. I enjoy that flexibility.”
Kumar’s intellectual playground is vast. The Houston native majored in physics before earning math and philosophy degrees at the University of Texas. She worked as a systems analyst before starting law school. After earning a J.D. at the University of Chicago, she litigated intellectual property cases at Chicago firms Kirkland & Ellis and Pattishall McAuliffe — but always kept a file of ideas in her desk drawer.
“While I liked science and technology, I also liked to write, and I liked building logical arguments, using things known to be true to prove something else true. I was trying to bring those two worlds together in one career path, which is ultimately how I got into the academic world.”
Kumar taught at the University of Houston Law Center for 14 years before joining the Law School in 2023, a decision she attributes to climate change, both real and political. Her scholarly pursuits reflect such real-world issues as the Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which led her to study how courts deal with technical information and how generalist judges might achieve access to neutral expert sources.
“She is extremely interested in using theory and her analytical skills to devise solutions that are administrable. She’s acutely aware of what is possible to ask decision-makers in policy capacities to do,” says Professor Arti Rai, faculty director at Duke’s Center for Innovation Policy. Kumar possesses skills that many academics do not, she adds, and is not shy about going “well beyond the four walls of academia. She is persuasive in an advocacy-oriented setting, but she wants to move beyond advocacy for the sake of advocacy. She wants to advocate for policies and approaches that she believes in personally.”
Kumar reveres justice, which she notes came into play when patent-holders dropped their prices and made drugs more available to people dying from COVID. These days she is looking at how countries can use their patent system to harm perceived enemies, either within their own country or to punish another country that has wronged them. “Usually patents are used to promote innovation and economic growth, but they’re also a tool of justice,” she says.
Rai admires Kumar’s profound interest in other people, cultures, and institutions, applauding Kumar’s efforts to learn German after accepting a Fulbright- Schuman Innovation Grant to study, in Germany, how Europe uses technically-trained patent judges. Kumar was also a visiting scholar at the University of Copenhagen Centre for Advanced Studies in Biomedical Innovation and has presented her research in Japan and the Netherlands.
As for her classroom and colleague persona, Kumar is “a lot of fun, and that’s not something I say lightly about most academics,” notes Rai.
Professor Lauren Simpson, who teaches lawyering skills and strategies at Houston Law, explains why that institution honored Kumar with several teaching awards. “She’s very clear and direct with students. She demands a high level of performance but also meets them where they are,” Simpson says. “She just clicks with them so well and conveys information in such an engaging way.”
“Once I got the opportunity to teach, I was hooked,” Kumar says. “I learn a lot from my students. Plus I like the opportunity to give advice and build mentoring relationships.” She begins every property law class with the Unsolicited Advice of the Day. And she sings. The former Houston Symphony Chorus member performs parody songs based on what she’s teaching, a practice that proved so popular it launched a karaoke contest with guest judges.
“We have a very musical student body here at Minnesota,” Kumar confides. “And I have the best job in the world. Being a law professor is the legal loophole of life.”