Public Lectures from the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge

Speaker: Dr Quentin Schaefer (11 South Square)Session 2: Current Disincentives and RemediesOn Saturday 21 March 2026, the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law (CIPIL) held its Annual Spring Conference entitled 'Abuse of Intellectual Property Rights'In Crypto Open Patent Alliance v Wright [2024] EWHC 1809 (Ch), [63], Mellor J. observed “IP rights, being monopolies of various sorts, are … justified in that their net benefit is in the public interest, with a view to fostering creativity and innovation. By corollary, where IP rights are abused to stifle creativity and innovation, the legal system ought to have the means to respond effectively.” The statement raises three questions which are the subject of this conference: (i) when are IP rights to be regarded as “abused”? (ii) What mechanisms exist to respond to such abuses? And (iii) Does the legal system have sufficient mechanisms by which to “respond effectively”?Programme:Abuses (This session not recorded)- Abuses of Trade Marks – Stuart Baran (3 New Square) - Abuses of Designs – David Stone (White & Case) - Abuse in FRAND Patent Litigation – Daniel Alexander KC (8 New Square) Current Disinventives and Remedies- Remedies for Abuses: Actions for Threats – Trevor Cook (Bird and Bird)- Preventing Misuse of interim injunctions: The Cross-Undertaking - Dr Katarina Foss-Solbrekk (University of Copenhagen) - Remedies for Abuses: The Role and Limits of Competition Law to Prevent Enforcement of Invalid IPRs– Dr Quentin Schaefer (11 South Square)- Preventing Abuses: Ethical Obligations of Patent and Trade Mark Attorneys – Phil Barnes (BarnesIP)Comparative Experience and Potential Reform- Does the UK Need a Distinct Doctrine of Abuse of Right? – Lessons from the Civil Law – Dr Amandine Leonard (University of Edinburgh) - Abuse of IP Rights. Lessons from the United States? Professor Leah Grinwald (Dean and Richard J. Morgan Professor of Law, University of Nevada)For more information see:https://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/seminars-and-events/cipil-spring-conference

The nineteenth Annual International Intellectual Property Lecture was delivered by Professor Ruth Okediji, Jeremiah Smith. Jr, Professor of Law; Faculty Co-Director, Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University on Tuesday 17 March 2026.The lecture entitled 'Thirty Plus One: TRIPS, Innovation, and the Political Future of Minimum IP Standards' took place at Emmanuel College, Cambridge.For more information see:https://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/

Speaker: Professor William J. Magnuson (Professor of Law, Texas A&M University School of Law)Abstract: A remarkable transformation is taking place in our financial markets. The rise of machine learning algorithms and other artificial intelligence models has rapidly overtaken older methods of financial decisionmaking, and the consequences of the revolution are beginning to be felt across the capital markets ecosystem, from stock exchanges to derivatives markets to currency trading. These new technologies offer great promise, including more accurate prices, faster transactions and more efficient trading. But they also create risks. From flash crashes to insider trading algorithms to adversarial attacks, artificial intelligence presents a range of unique vulnerabilities that could lead to significant and wide-ranging harm to our financial system. Legal frameworks devised to structure and constrain financial institutions, in turn, are ill-equipped to deal with these harms because they were designed based on outdated assumptions about the structure of markets, as well as the nature of its primary actors. This Article offers the first comprehensive account of the economic, political and legal consequences of the rise of artificially intelligent markets. It demonstrates how the major driver of this shift has been the hedge fund industry, an opaque and lightly regulated sector of the financial ecosystem that has long been an early-adopter of financial technology. It concludes by proposing a series of escalating regulatory reforms that might better fit financial regulation to our new artificially intelligent markets.William Magnuson is a professor at Texas A&M Law School, where he teaches corporate law. Prior to joining Texas A&M, he taught law at Harvard, worked as an associate in the mergers and acquisitions group of Sullivan & Cromwell, and served as a journalist in the Rome bureau of the Washington Post. He is the author of For Profit: A History of Corporations (Basic Books, 2022) and Blockchain Democracy: Technology, Law and the Rule of the Crowd (Cambridge University Press, 2020). His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, the L.A. Times, and Bloomberg. He holds a B.A. from Princeton University, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, and an M.A. from the University of Padua.3CL runs the 3CL Travers Smith Lunchtime Seminar Series, featuring leading academics from the Faculty, and high-profile practitioners.For more information see the Centre for Corporate and Commercial Law website:http://www.3cl.law.cam.ac.uk/

Based on his experience, but speaking in his personal capacity, Ambassador Tomohiro Mikanagi will discuss the current state of the rules of international law against attempts to acquire territory by force. When powerful States are not satisfied with the territorial status quo and are unwilling to give up their interests for the sake of international peace, there is an inherent difficulty in stopping their attempts to acquire territory by force. In the past 100 years, efforts have been made to stop such attempts. Based on the recognition of the efforts made so far, Ambassador Mikanagi will examine the current state of the rules of international law against such attempts. He will examine the relationship between the prohibition on the use of force and the prohibition on the acquisition of territory by force and will discuss the scope of these prohibitions. He will also discuss whether States can acquire territory by the use of force in self-defence and examine obligations for third States arising from the violation of the prohibition on the acquisition of territory by force.Ambassador Tomohiro Mikanagi is the Ambassador and Deputy Permanent Representative of Japan to the United Nations and was the Japanese Legal Advisor from 2022 to 2024. He also holds the title of Ambassador-at-Large for Cooperation on International Law.He was a visiting fellow at the Lauterpacht Centre of International Law and is currently an LCIL Partner Fellow. He participated in the proceedings of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for the Advisory Opinion issued on July 19, 2024. Japan's oral statement in February 2024 was unique as it focused exclusively on the prohibition on the acquisition of territory by force.Chair: Prof Sandesh Sivakumaran

Speaker: Associate Professor David A. Simon, Northeastern University School of LawBiography: David A. Simon, J.D., LL.M., Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Law at Northeastern University School of Law, where he teaches courses on tort law, administrative law, and drug & device regulation. Professor Simon’s research focuses on innovation in healthcare, with an emphasis on drugs and devices. His work has appeared or will appear in a variety of publications, including the Texas Law Review, the Boston College Law Review, the Emory Law Journal, the Georgia Law Review, the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, the Journal of Law & the Biosciences, JAMA, Nature Biotechnology and the Journal of Law, Medicine, & Ethics. A complete list of Dr. Simon’s publications is available on his CV . Professor Simon is the Principal Investigator on the Project on Medical Device Safety and co-director of the Amy J. Reed Collaborative for Medical Device Safety, funded by Arnold Ventures. He is also a member of the UIUC CLASSICA research team, a project funded by the European Union. He has previously served on the faculties of Harvard Law School, George Washington University Law School, and the University of Kansas School of Law. During histime at Harvard Law School, he led a three-year project at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics dubbed Diagnosing in the Home: The Ethical, Legal, and Regulatory Challenges and Opportunities of Digital Home Health, and funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Professor Simon is also a founder of two nonprofits—Harmed Americans for Reform in Medical-Device Safety and Project TCF20—and a practicing member of the Illinois and Massachusetts Bars.Abstract: Copyright law grants authors special non-economic “moral rights” to prevent others from using their works in certain ways. In their strongest “solipsistic” form, moral rights give the author the absolute power to prevent any use that offends her sensibilities. While the solipsistic view of moral rights exists in only a few countries, the sentiment underlying it is pervasive in moral rights theory: an author’s claims are superior to all others because only the author knows when harm occurs, regardless of others’ views. In other words, certain uses of works result in the author experiencing harm that no one else can experience and that does not depend on what others think. This Article asks and evaluates the following question: can harm based only on the author’s subjective experience justify solipsistic moral rights? It argues that the answer is probably not—and that, if supported, solipsistic moral rights will be tightly limited. Drawing on literature in science fiction and philosophy, this Article. contends that the best justification for the monastic view is also the most implausible: authors have moral rights only when another’s use causes the author to experience an inconsistency between her perceived use of the work and her memories of creating the work. In short, an author’s rights are contingent on her ability to remember creating her work. This is the best justification because the author’s memories of creating the work satisfy all the requirements for authorial harm: it identifies discrete psychological states that are tied directly and only to the author’s acts of creation, independent of others’ perceptions. It is the least plausible, however, because it conditions important rights on one’s ability to remember past actions. Despite its seeming implausibility, the author’s memories of creation provide the best support for grounding monastic moral rights. As a consequence, the case for monastic moral rights, if it can be made, is tightly limited to cases where another’s use of an author’s work causes a negative psychological response directly tied to the author’s memories of creating the work.For more information see:https://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/seminars-and-events/cipil-seminars

Lecture summary: In 1963, Stanley Hoffmann told the American Society of International Law: “Since every Power wants to turn its interests, ideas and gains into law, a study of the ‘legal strategies’ of the various units, i.e., of what kinds of norms they try to promote, and through what techniques, may be as fruitful for the political scientist as a study of more purely diplomatic, military or economic strategies.” In this lecture, Michael Byers outlines his two-decade long project to expose and explain how a class of highly sophisticated international lawyers, often referred to as ‘legal advisers’, strategically seek to manipulate law-making processes to make or change rules to favour their state.Michael Byers (PhD Cantab) is Professor of Global Politics and International Law at the University of British Columbia. He also co-directs the Outer Space Institute, a global network of space experts united by their commitment to highly innovative, transdisciplinary research that addresses grand challenges facing the continued use and exploration of space. Dr. Byers has been a Junior Research Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford University; Professor of Law at Duke University; and a Visiting Professor at the universities of Cape Town, Tel Aviv, Nord (Norway), Novosibirsk (Russia), St Andrews, and the Geneva Graduate Institute. His two most recent books, both published by Cambridge University Press, are International Law and the Arctic and Who Owns Outer Space?Chair: Prof Lorand Bartels, Centre FellowThe Friday Lunchtime Lecture series is kindly supported by Cambridge University Press & Assessment.

Speaker: Professor Niamh Dunne, LSEBiography: Niamh Dunne is a professor at the Law School of the London School of Economics, where she teaches and researches in competition law.Abstract: Is it possible to reconcile the competing visions of what constitutes ‘effective’ abuse of dominance enforcement that emerge from the contemporary jurisprudence of the Commission and the Court of Justice? Article 102 has been a focal point for efforts both to modernise but also to render more effective the application of EU competition law, with different strands of recent case law emphasising the pursuit of market efficiency, the protection of equality of market access, and the prevention of exploitation by dominant undertakings. This presentation will explore the coherence of these developments, and consider whether this question matters in light of the Commission’s stated objective of achieving ‘a robust enforcement’ of Article 102. For more information see:https://www.cels.law.cam.ac.uk/weekly-seminar-series

On 6 March 2026 Professor Susan Bright (University of Oxford) delivered the 2026 XXIV Old Buildings Lecture entitled "New Housing, Old Rules: Can Land Law Keep up?".In recent years, more than 80% of new housing estates developed by large housebuilders include amenities that are not adopted by the relevant statutory bodies. As a result, roads, public play areas, drainage systems, and other shared facilities are maintained by private management companies, with the costs passed on to homeowners. Yet, as Lord Templeman famously observed in Rhone v Stephens (1994), every student of real property law learns at an early stage that positive covenants affecting freehold land do not run with the land and are enforceable only against the original covenantor. How, then, are successive homeowners made to contribute to these ongoing obligations?This lecture examines the 'ways and means' employed by conveyancers to ensure that such covenants bind successors in title and evaluates whether these mechanisms achieve satisfactory outcomes, both in terms of legal effectiveness and their broader implications for contemporary notions of homeownership.Timings:Professor Graham Virgo - Introduction: 00:00Professor Susan Bright: 01:31The XXIV Old Buildings Lecture is an annual address delivered by a guest of the Cambridge Private Law Centre, and the event is sponsored by XXIV Old Buildings.More information about this lecture is available from the Private Law Centre website:https://www.privatelaw.law.cam.ac.uk/events

Lecture summary: Early March 1946 marked a rough midpoint in proceedings before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. The prosecution had closed its case, with France and the USSR just having presented most of the trial’s eyewitnesses – two of them women. The defense opened just as Churchill gave his Iron Curtain speech. Elsewhere in Palace of Justice, personnel were going home even as others arrived, to prepare subsequent proceedings. These new ‘Nurembergers’ included more women, more people of colour, and more people who had not served in the world war then on trial. By centring such developments, this talk will offer a less-travelled account of the first international criminal trial.An expert in international law and its subfields, including legal history and international criminal law, Diane Marie Amann has served as Regents’ Professor, Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law, and Faculty Co-Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center at the University of Georgia School of Law, and is an Academic Affiliate at University College London Faculty of Laws. She was Special Adviser to International Criminal Court Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda on Children in & affected by Armed Conflict, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and has held leadership posts in the American and European societies of international law. Amann is writing an Oxford University Press book about lawyers and other women professionals at the first Nuremberg trial.

Speaker: Dr Christopher Stothers, Partner at Freshfields in London and DublinBiography: Christopher Stothers is a partner at Freshfields in London and Dublin and an experienced patent litigator, managing strategic, cross-border disputes around Europe and beyond for over 20 years. He has acted as a legal practitioner in many oppositions and appeals before the European Patent Office and as a UPC Representative in several local divisions and the Court of Appeal. He supervised IP students at Downing and St Catharine’s between 2004-2007, and since then has taught part-time at UCL where he is an Honorary Professor of Practice.Abstract: International patent law has undergone piecemeal harmonisation over many years, from WIPO’s Paris Convention of 1883 through the Strasbourg Convention of 1963, the Patent Cooperation Treaty of 1970, the European Patent Convention of 1973, the (never ratified) Community Patent Conventions of 1975 and 1989, the TRIPS Agreement of 1994, the London Agreement of 2000 and the UPC Agreement of 2013. Despite these efforts, patent porfolios are typically still maintained and enforced on a strategic territorial basis, which in bigger cases often leads to cross-border disputes, particularly over standard essential patents and important pharmaceutical patents. The last decade has seen the re-emergence of cross-border enforcement by courts, including retaliatory anti-suit, anti-anti-suit, anti-enforcement and now anti-interim licence injunctions. Christopher has been involved in cross-border patent enforcement for over 20 years and will talk about the changes he has seen (and what is coming in the future).For more information see:https://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/seminars-and-events/cipil-seminars