Professor Margo A. Bagley

Margo A. Bagley is Vice Dean and Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law at Emory University School of Law. She rejoined the Emory faculty in 2016 after a decade at the University of Virginia School of Law, where she was most recently the Hardy Cross Dillard Professor of Law. In fall 2022, she was the Hieken Visiting Professor in Patent Law at Harvard Law School.

Bagley is a well-known and widely cited scholar on a variety of international intellectual property topics and is one of the foremost experts on international patent law issues. At Emory, her courses include Domestic and International Patent Law, Trademark Law, and International Intellectual Property. She also co-developed the award-winning TI:GER® program (Technological Innovation Generating Economic Results), an innovative educational venture which brings together graduate students in law, business, science, and engineering to work on start-up projects and learn the process of transforming promising research into economically viable projects.

Bagley received her JD in 1996 from Emory, where she was a Robert W. Woodruff Fellow, an editor of the Emory Law Journal, and elected to Order of the Coif. She is a member of the Georgia bar and is licensed to practice before the US Patent and Trademark Office. Bagley worked as an associate with Smith, Gambrell & Russell, LLP and Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner, LLP before becoming an assistant professor of law at Emory University in 1999 and associate professor in 2002. She was a visiting professor of law at Washington & Lee University School of Law in fall 2001 and at the University of Virginia School of Law in fall 2005, after which she joined the University of Virginia faculty in 2006. She is a faculty lecturer with the Munich Intellectual Property Law Center at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, and also has taught International Patent Law and related courses in China, Cuba, Israel, and Singapore.

Bagley recently served on the National Academies Committee on Advancing Commercialization from the Federal Laboratories, and previously served on the National Academies Committee on University Management of Intellectual Property: Lessons from a Generation of Experience, Research, and Dialogue. She is also an expert technical advisor to the African Union Commission in several World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) matters, is the Friend of the Chair in the WIPO Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore, and is a collaborator with the Harvard University Global Access in Action Program.

Bagley currently serves as a member of the U.S. DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) ELSI (Ethical, Legal, Societal Issues) Team for the BRACE (Bio-Inspired Restoration of Aged Concrete Edifices) project. She also has served as a consultant to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the UN Food and Agriculture Organization Secretariat for the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, and as a US Department of Commerce Commercial Law Development Program advisor. In addition, she served as a member of the Ad Hoc Technical Expert Group on Digital Sequence Information on Genetic Resources for the CBD and Nagoya Protocol and has been an expert witness in several patent law disputes. Her scholarship focuses on comparative issues relating to patents and biotechnology, pharmaceuticals and access to medicines, traditional knowledge protection for indigenous peoples and local communities, technology transfer, and IP and social justice. In 2018, Professor Bagley was awarded and managed a $50,000 Emory Global Health Institute grant for a drug quality assurance program in Mozambique/Malawi, which involved a successful collaboration with the Harvard Global Access in Action (GAiA) program and the Emory-Rollins School of Public Health. She is also a McDonald Distinguished Senior Fellow through the Emory Center for the Study of Law and Religion.

Bagley has published numerous articles and book chapters, as well as two books with co-authors: Bagley, Okediji and Erstling, International Patent Law & Policy (West Publishing 2013) and Patent Law in Global Perspective (Okediji and Bagley eds., Oxford University Press 2014). A new book on International Patent Law is forthcoming with Professor Rochelle Dreyfuss (2023). A chemical engineer with a B.S.Ch.E. degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Bagley worked in industry (with the Procter & Gamble Company and the Coca Cola Company) for several years before attending law school and is a co-inventor on two patents, one for reduced fat peanut butter and the other for improved bedding technology. Bagley also completed research internships at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, AT&T Bell Laboratories, and the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center.