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Professor CORNISH QC

Herchel Smith Professor of Intellectual Property Law

Background

Professor Bill Cornish originally from Adelaide, was a postgraduate at Oxford - one of the first group of British Commonwealth scholars in 1960. He was side-tracked from a return to Australia by a post in the Law Department at the LSE. Until moving to Cambridge in 1990, he spent most of his teaching life there; he went to Queen Mary College in 1968 but returned to the LSE to take up the Chair of English Law in 1970. On arriving in Cambridge, he became the first Director of the Law Faculty’s Centre for European Legal Studies. For that centre he directs a course in English and EU law, which is taught at Warsaw University and is now being extended to other law faculties in Central and Eastern Europe. Professor Cornish became a Fellow of the British Academy in 1984 and is an External Academic Member of the Max-Planck Institute for Intellectual Property Law, Munich. In 1997 he was made an Honorary Queen's Counsel.

Research Interests

Professor Cornish's particular interests are in the law of intellectual property and in modern legal history. Among his publications are:

He has recently been Chairman of the National Academies Policy Advisory Group's working party on 'Intellectual Property and the Academic Community', whose report is available from the Royal Society. He writes: "My special interests at the moment include the adaptation of the patent system to biotechnology and the impact of multi-media on intellectual property".

Contact

Professor Cornish can be contacted by:

    Mail:        Professor Cornish
Magdalene College
Cambridge
CB3 0AG
United Kingdom
Email