Professor Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Shyam Balganesh writes and teaches in the areas of copyright law, intellectual property, and legal theory. He has written extensively on understanding how intellectual property and innovation policy can benefit from the use of ideas, concepts, and structures from different areas of the common law, especially private law. His recent work explores the interaction between copyright law and key institutional features of the American legal system. He is also working on a series of articles advancing an account of “legal internalism” that explains the shape and trajectory of legal thinking. Balganesh’s work has appeared in leading law journals, including the Columbia Law Review, Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and Yale Law Journal. He is also a co-author of sections of the leading copyright law treatise Nimmer on Copyright. 

Before joining the Columbia Law School faculty, Balganesh was a professor of law and co-director of the Center for Technology, Innovation and Competition at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. Prior to that, he was a Bigelow Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was an articles and essays editor of the Yale Law Journal and a student fellow at the Information Society Project. Prior to that, he spent two years as a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford, where he received a B.C.L. and M.Phil.

In 2017, he was elected a member of the American Law Institute, and since 2015 has served as an adviser to the Restatement of the Law, Copyright. Balganesh also has been recognized for his teaching: In 2017, he received the Robert A. Gorman Award for Excellence in Teaching and, in 2015, the A. Leo Levin Award for Excellence in an Introductory Course, both at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.