Jorge Contreras

Jorge Contreras is visiting the University of Minnesota Law School during the 2024-25 academic year from the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law, where he is the James T. Jensen Endowed Professor for Transactional Law and the Director of the Program on Intellectual Property and Technology Law. He has previously served as a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Tilburg University in the Netherlands.  Professor Contreras’s research focuses on intellectual property, antitrust law, technical standardization and science policy. Prior to entering academia, Professor Contreras was a partner at an international law firm where he practiced transactional law in Boston, Washington DC and London. He has published more than 150 academic articles and chapters and has written or edited twelve books including The Genome Defense: Inside the Epic Legal Battle to Determine Who Owns Your DNA (Hachette/Algonquin, 2021), which was recognized by the New York Times as one of the top nonfiction books of the season and has received praise from news outlets ranging from the Wall Street Journal to Nature. Professor Contreras’s scholarship has received numerous awards and recognition, including the Patent & Trademark Office Society’s 2021 Rossman Memorial Award and the University of Utah’s 2020 Distinguished Research Award, and he is a three-time winner of the IPKat blog’s award for Best Patent Law Book of the Year.  He is an elected member of the American Law Institute and the former co-chair of the National Conference of Lawyers and Scientists. He has testified before the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, the Federal Trade Commission and the European Commission, and has served as an expert witness in complex intellectual property cases in the United States, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, India, Taiwan and Brazil. He received his JD from Harvard Law School, earned his BSEE and BA in English at Rice University and clerked for Chief Justice Thomas R. Philips of the Texas Supreme Court.