Professor Jorge L. Contreras

Jorge L. Contreras teaches in the areas of intellectual property, antitrust law and science policy at the University of Utah, S.J. Quinney College of Law and is the Director of the Program on Intellectual Property and Technology Law. 

Professor Contreras has previously served on the law faculties of American University Washington College of Law and Washington University in St. Louis, and was a partner at the international law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP, where he practiced transactional and intellectual property law in Boston, London and Washington DC.

Professor Contreras’s current research focuses, among other things, on the development of technical standards and the use and dissemination of data generated by large-scale scientific research projects. He has written or edited eleven books and published more than 100 scholarly articles and book chapters. His most recent book, The Genome Defense: Inside the Epic Legal Battle to Determine Who Owns Your DNA (Algonquin, 2021) was named one of eleven new non-fiction books to read by the New York Times, and has been favorably reviewed by Publisher's Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, the Wall St. Journal, Nature and numerous other outlets.  Professor Contreras's articles have appeared in scientific, legal and policy journals including Science, Nature, NYU Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Iowa Law Review, North Carolina Law Review, Florida State Law Review, American University Law Review, Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, Berkeley Technology Law Journal, Antitrust Law Journal, and Utah Law Review. He has been quoted by numerous media outlets including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist, Bloomberg, Washington Post, Korea Times and has been featured on NPR, PRI and BBC radio shows and a range of podcasts and online news programs.

Professor Contreras serves Co-Chair of the Interdisciplinary Division of the ABA’s Section of Science & Technology Law and a member of the Advisory Board of the American Antitrust Institute. He has served as Co-Chair of the National Conference of Lawyers and Scientists, a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Committee on Intellectual Property Management in Standard-Setting Processes, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Council of Councils, the Advisory Council of NIH's National Center for the Advancement of Translational Sciences (NCATS), the Cures Acceleration Network (CAN) Board, the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research, and the Intellectual Property Rights Policy Committee of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). He also serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Utah Genome Project.

He is a cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School (JD) and Rice University (BA, BSEE) and clerked for Chief Justice Thomas R. Philips of the Texas Supreme Court.