Rate My Professor Christopher Sprigman

Christopher Sprigman is the Murray and Kathleen Bring Professor of Law at New York University School of Law, a position he has held since 2013. He serves as Co-Director of the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy and Faculty Director of the NYU Law Veterans Disability Legal Services Program since 2021. Prior to NYU, Sprigman was a faculty member at the University of Virginia School of Law from 2005 to 2013, where he held the Class of 1963 Research Professorship in Honor of Graham C. Lilly and Peter W. Low. He earned a J.D. with honors from the University of Chicago Law School in 1993, after receiving a B.A. with honors in History from the University of Pennsylvania in 1988. Following law school, he clerked for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and practiced intellectual property law in New York and Washington, D.C., accumulating over twenty-five years of experience in IP litigation, counseling, licensing, and acquisitions.

Sprigman teaches intellectual property law, antitrust law, torts, and comparative constitutional law. His scholarship focuses on how legal rules affect innovation, particularly in the domains of antitrust, comparative constitutional law, copyright, intellectual property, law and economics, patents, and trademarks. Key publications include the open-licensed textbook Antitrust: Principles, Cases, and Materials (third edition, with Daniel Francis, 2023); Copyright Law: Cases and Materials (version 7.0, with Jeanne C. Fromer); The Piracy Paradox: Innovation and Intellectual Property in Fashion Design (Virginia Law Review, 2006, with Kal Raustiala); The Creativity Effect (University of Chicago Law Review, 2011, with Christopher Buccafusco); Copyright and the Rule of Reason (Colorado Technology Law Journal, 2009); and Copyright, Meet Antitrust: The Supreme Court's Warhol Decision and the Rise of Competition Analysis in Fair Use (Yale Law Journal Forum, 2025). Sprigman is the Reporter for the American Law Institute's Restatement of the Law, Copyright, the organization's first restatement of copyright law. He previously served on the Board of Directors of Creative Commons from 2013 to 2016 and is a founding member of Lex Lumina PLLC. His work has influenced discussions on intellectual property incentives, empirical approaches to copyright valuation, and the intersection of antitrust and fair use doctrines.