For some, the moment was mere entertainment. For Sprigman, 48, the performance was “a brilliant piece of trademark appropriation art—great material for my teaching and inspiration for research.”

Moving from the University of Virginia School of Law to join NYU Law has invigorated Sprigman, an intellectual property law scholar with a focus on the intersection of IP and culture.

Writing for the popular Freakonomics blog, Sprigman has weighed in on Banksy as well as Cronuts, Trader Joe’s, and multiplex cinemas. He published a series of op-eds in the New York Times and elsewhere on the NSA controversy and has written for other influential media outlets. “He’s always got his antennas up,” says colleague Jeanne Fromer. “He sniffs out an issue that people care about and connects it to something deeper that he is thinking about.”

Sprigman has carved out a niche in the area of “IP without IP,” or industries that survive in the absence of strong IP protection. “There’s lots of conversation about ‘IP without IP,’” says Professor Mark McKenna of Notre Dame Law School. “Chris is one of the first and most prominent voices in that mode of scholarship.”
Conventional wisdom holds that copying kills creativity and that laws protecting against imitation are essential to innovation and economic success. Sprigman, along with his co-author and childhood friend Kal Raustiala, have challenged that notion in their book The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation. Drawing on fashion, food, finance, comedy, and even football, which enjoy fewer IP rights than industries like music, movies, and pharmaceuticals, they show that innovation can thrive in a world of less, and less effective, IP protections.

[See “Creative License ” for more on Sprigman’s scholarship.]

Sprigman’s ideas and arguments are often bold and self-assured, traits that were apparent early in life. He was raised in Smithtown, on Long Island’s North Shore, by his parents Fred and Marilyn, both schoolteachers, with a large extended family. He spent his days by the water Huckleberry Finn style, “fishing, clamming, eating my lunch on the beach, and watching birds,” he recalls. “I was self-directed and interested in a lot of things, master of my own time.”

This willingness to dive into diverse interests is reflected in Sprigman’s winding path to academia. After earning his bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania in history, magna cum laude, he worked at a publishing company, played guitar in various bands, traveled through East Asia, and toyed with the idea of pursuing journalism before entering the University of Chicago Law School.

He earned his JD with honors, then clerked for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, worked as an associate at Davis Polk & Wardwell, and clerked for Justice Lourens Ackermann of the Constitutional Court of South Africa in Johannesburg while teaching at the University of the Witwatersrand School of Law. Returning to the US in 1999, he worked as an appellate counsel in the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division during the time that US v. Microsoft Corp. was going to trial. “It was absolutely fascinating,” he says. “We were deeply immersed in the facts that made law.”

Sprigman returned to law practice, making partner at King & Spalding at age 35. But not yet ready to settle down career-wise, he landed a fellowship in 2003 at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. Sprigman set a goal of writing an article within four months that he could take on the job market, if his mentor and the center’s founder Lawrence Lessig deemed it satisfactory. The result was a paper that reintroduced the idea of formalities in copyright law. Its boldness won Lessig’s approval.

“The conventional wisdom in the world of IP scholars at the time was that this was a crazy, radical idea. It was a brave thing to do,” says Lessig, now at Harvard Law School, adding that Sprigman’s current work in “IP without IP” demonstrates the same ahead-of-the-curve “edginess.”

Since moving from Charlottesville, where he earned a reputation for caring equally about teaching, scholarship, and colleagues, Sprigman has been enjoying living once again near his extended family and parents, who are still in the house where he grew up. When not working, he cooks gourmet meals for friends; spends time with his children Iain, 14, and Arin, 12; and cycles. “Down in Virginia, I used to get a lot of thinking done on the bike. That’s more challenging in New York,” he says. “Maybe it’s time to start running again.”

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“It’s the intellectual excitement,” King explains. (A note about how to greet him: His title, given in 2013 in recognition of his distinguished public service, is Baron King of Lothbury, so he is formally addressed as Lord King. But he urges people to call him Mervyn.) “NYU is a unique law school because it brings together people of different disciplines to understand how different institutions operate. To understand many of the issues which affect the monetary system, it’s crucial to understand the legal framework in which banking has grown up. I have a lot of experience to reflect on some of those issues.”

Indeed he does. Born in 1948 to a railway worker and his wife, King studied at King’s College, Cambridge, and Harvard (as a Kennedy Scholar), then taught at Cambridge and Birmingham universities. He also served as visiting professor at both Harvard and MIT (where he had an adjoining office with future Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke). After teaching at the London School of Economics, where he co-founded the Financial Markets Group in 1987, King was offered the opportunity in 1991 to put economic philosophies into practice as chief economist of the Bank of England. He was appointed governor 12 years later.

While he easily qualified as one of the smartest guys in the room, King “was never an academic prima donna,” Bernanke says. One reason, Bernanke hypothesizes, is that King moved out of academia and into policymaking relatively early in his career. “The world of policy, where you’re trying to deal with the complexities of what’s happening in the economy and the markets,” he explains, “is messier and, consequently, tends to induce more humility in its practitioners.”

King attributes his clarity amid the confusion of the crisis to the fact that he is a history buff. He notes that events that occurred more than 200 years ago still have relevance, such as Alexander Hamilton’s idea of a central bank that would assume individual states’ debts and talk in European financial circles recently about whether that could work in today’s eurozone. “My interest in history was a big antidote to thinking that mathematical models explain everything,” he says. “They’re very important, but they’re just tools of the trade.”

That’s only one of the lessons King looks forward to teaching would-be policymakers in his 12-session seminar, Money and Modern Capitalism: Law and Business. Yet even though he is aware that overreliance on mathematical models can lead to a myopic mindset, he notes that “it’s very helpful to have an intellectual framework in which to think about policy questions, and that framework is economics.” During the financial crisis, he points out, “people who were trained in economics and were doing economic policy had a clear intellectual framework that allowed them to think through the issues and come up with answers.” Those without a background in economics risked approaching each question as a one-off issue rather than seeing the bigger picture.

“I suspect he’ll be a very popular teacher, because he’s able to explain complicated ideas in an accessible and entertaining way,” Bernanke says.

“I’ve read a few of his speeches; they’re quite unusual for a central banker. They’re not dry and technical, like my speeches.”

Known for his wide range of interests, King frequently sprinkles his speeches and lectures with references to cricket, music, art, and his beloved Aston Villa soccer team. (When he was interviewed for the BBC’s popular Desert Island Discs program, one piece of music he chose to listen to if marooned on an island was a song cheering on Aston Villa to victory in the 1982 European Cup.) “Regardless of background or education, people can be touched by a painting or a piece of music or sport,” King explains. “All three can bring people together, and that is important.”

Since retiring from the Bank of England, King has picked up a new hobby: With his wife, Barbara Melander, King has been taking lessons in fox trot and swing dancing. Will he be tempted to compete on Dancing with the Stars? “No, no,” he demurs. Then, demonstrating his much-lauded analytic skills and judgment, he adds, “That would be far too risky.”

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“When you get the balance between your belt weight and your buoyancy control device just right, you don’t tend to sink or to rise,” he says. “That’s an amazing feeling; you feel like you are flying.”

He has soared through academia as well. Catan, 34, earned a PhD in economics and a law degree from NYU, where he specialized in corporate law, mergers and acquisitions, and corporate governance.

Catan is known for innovative scholarship backed by solid empirical research. In “The Irrelevance of Active Poison Pills,” which he presented at the 2014 American Law and Economics Association annual meeting, he examined how the adoption of a poison pill—a defense tactic against unwanted takeovers—affects corporations. Several studies have found that having a pill in place is negatively correlated with firm value, Catan says, and during the last decade institutional investors have pressured firms into dropping their active pills.

The commonly accepted theory was that adopting the pill was not in the shareholders’ interest, and that is why those firms would have lower value. Catan claims, however, that other factors may render any correlation meaningless. “It may be the case that firms adopt the poison pill because the directors perceive the shares as being mispriced,” he says, which would confound any attempt to infer how the presence of a pill affects firm value or operating performance. “This begs the question of whether the anti-pill crusade of the past decade was actually warranted.”

Catan is also writing “The Significance of State Anti-Takeover Statutes: A Law and Finance Perspective” with Marcel Kahan, George T. Lowy Professor of Law. “Catan is a very careful, sophisticated empirical scholar who has a detailed understanding of legal doctrine,” Kahan says. “His approach is to employ his knowledge of the law and of empirical methodology. Very few other scholars share this combination.”

Catan plans to teach Corporations this fall, and he’ll be co-convening the Law and Economics Colloquium with Jennifer Arlen ’86, Norma Z. Paige Professor of Law. At some point, he’d like to teach courses on mergers and acquisitions, and shareholder activism.

Earning his JD in 2003 from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, Catan received the gold medal for achieving the highest GPA in his class.

The son of an engineer and a kinesiologist, Catan was born in Buenos Aires in 1980. He has younger twin brothers, one an accountant and the other an engineer, and is married to Cecilia Parlatore Siritto, who also received a PhD in economics from NYU. She was an assistant professor of finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and has recently joined the faculty of NYU Stern.

As the couple prepared for their return to New York, Catan reflected on their good fortune: “I couldn’t ask for a better fit than NYU,” he says. “I’m honored to be a member of this faculty and feel especially lucky that others are interested in analyzing legal institutions from an economic perspective.”

Besides anticipating his new job, Catan is also looking forward to reuniting with another passion: the restaurants of New York. “I’m looking forward to a nice bowl of khao soi from Pok Pok in Brooklyn. You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I love food,” he says with a laugh.

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He is the son of a prominent Ghanaian politician and upper-crust British mother whose biracial society wedding caused an international sensation and is thought to have inspired the film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. He spent his youth in two privileged but very different environments in Ghana and England, moving seamlessly between them.

Appiah now lives in Tribeca with his spouse, Henry Finder, editorial director of the New Yorker, in an apartment filled with art and artifacts that reflect his many interests and travels—from Ghanaian spoons once used to weigh gold to oils by painters of the British royal court. Hosting book parties with influential writers such as Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Gopnik, Appiah is as conversant on the philosophy of language as he is on shearing sheep—and he can talk about those subjects in English, French, German, Latin, and Asante Twi.

“We live in worlds shaped by many identities—race, gender, sexual orientation, religion. I had many identities that helped cultivate my interest in managing the diversity around us,” says Appiah, a renowned philosopher who joined NYU Law this year with a dual appointment in the Department of Philosophy.

“He is the cosmopolitan citizen that he writes about,” says Amy Gutmann, Appiah’s co-author on Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (1998) and University of Pennsylvania president.

“He knows and appreciates many different cultures, contributes to every community of which he is a part, and is absolutely comfortable wherever he is.” Appiah is charming and disarming, New Yorker editor David Remnick says: “I would not mistake the great elegance of his carriage, conversation, and bearing for a lack of really ferocious rigor in what he writes and thinks.”

Appiah first gained widespread prominence with the publication of his groundbreaking, partially autobiographical 1992 book In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. It analyzes the misconceptions that have clouded discussions of race, Africa, and nationalism since the 19th century and asserts that race is a social construct with no legitimate biological basis.

Appiah’s ideas about identity reached their greatest expression in his celebrated 2006 work, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. In it, Appiah sets forth a challenge: to be a global citizen with shared moral responsibilities to all of humanity, while also accepting and valuing differences in belief, color, and creed. “My slogan is: cosmopolitanism is universality plus difference.”

“I grew up in a place where people believe in witchcraft,” says Appiah. “Though I don’t, I can still be friends with people who disagree over that rather fundamental question of how the world works.” Appiah takes on his share of moral responsibility by advocating for human rights in his work with PEN American Center, where he was president, and with other organizations. In 2008 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. This year he joined the board of the New York Public Library.

Appiah’s father, Joseph Emmanuel, was an ambassador and occasional member of Parliament. His mother, Enid Margaret “Peggy,” was a writer who was active in the philanthropic and cultural life of Kumasi, Ghana. Joseph was related by marriage to two Ashanti kings, while Peggy could trace her blue-blooded lineage to the Norman Conquest. “My father and mother insisted that we be proud of both sides of the family,” says Appiah. “I never felt any difficulty about who we were, though other people often did.”

Growing up in Kumasi, Appiah recalls visiting his great uncle, King Prempeh II, who sat on a heavy chair and dressed in rich African togas. His family’s home, in a black upper-class neighborhood, held more books than the local library and was
an obligatory stop for visiting dignitaries. When his father was abruptly jailed for sympathizing with the opposition, seven-year-old Anthony was sent to live with his maternal grandmother, Lady Cripps, in England. She was herself “a cosmopolitan thinker,” Appiah says, who had spent time in China distributing money for famine relief.

Appiah continued his education in England after his father was freed, attending exclusive private schools. As a teen, he was part of an intellectual left-leaning evangelical group that read the major 20th-century theologians and philosophers. He entered Clare College at the University of Cambridge intending to study medicine, but switched to philosophy. There he met Henry Louis Gates, who tried to recruit him to help build a black studies program in the US.

Appiah, however, earned his bachelor’s and doctorate in analytical philosophy from Cambridge and taught briefly in Ghana before joining Gates at Yale in 1981. Within the next decade, he would follow Gates to Cornell, Duke, and Harvard, where the two co-edited Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience and built up the W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute, which Gates now heads. “I’ve never met a person more comfortable in his own skin and in the complexity of all that that means,” says Gates about Appiah. “Anthony’s mind is too subtle to succumb to categorizations of being black or white, Ghanaian or English. He taught me that we are all the product of multiple identities.”

In 2002, Appiah left Harvard to become the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. He was drawn to NYU in part to work once again with law students, as he did while a visiting professor in 1998. He will teach a course that explores how honor—the subject of his 2010 book The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen—supports and competes with the law. Appiah plans to spend at least part of every year at NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU’s other satellite locations, and to teach jointly with colleagues abroad.

Closer to home, he and Finder spend weekends in an 18th-century farmhouse near Princeton that they share with ducks, geese, and sheep. Appiah cherishes having a respite from the city and a place for their extended family to visit. Yet ever the cosmopolitan, he says: “If I had to choose between one or the other, I would choose the city.”

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Steven Hawkins ’88 (left) and Alina Das ’05

Hawkins has had a varied career in public interest law, from the NAACP LDF, where he successfully won the release of three black teens wrongly convicted in Tennessee, to the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty’s successful campaign to end executions for juvenile crimes. He also advocated for social justice from the philanthropic side, directing Atlantic Philanthropies’ $60 million campaign targeting human rights and national security abuses.

Professor Alina Das ’05, in presenting his award, spoke of Hawkins’s inspiration for social justice stemming from meeting people when he was young who were incarcerated. “Steven Hawkins has had the audacity to act on behalf of those whom our society has chosen to lock up and throw away the key,” she said. “By bringing human rights home, he is breaking down the walls, not drawing lines between the deserving and undeserving, but recognizing the need to dismantle the racist and oppressive systems that infringe on all of our human rights.”

Jenny Yang ’96 (left) and Burt Neuborne

Yang was appointed by President Barack Obama to the EEOC and at the close of her first year named vice chair. Previously a partner at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll and a member of its Civil Rights and Employment practice group, she worked on cases such as Beck v. Boeing Company, in which she successfully represented 28,000-plus female employees alleging sex discrimination. She also served as a senior trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.

Inez Milholland Professor of Civil Liberties Burt Neuborne presented Yang’s award. Later, he said: “I thought she was a terrific student with a great future when she was a star in my Brennan Center seminar. I was right. During a distinguished career in private practice, and now as vice chair of the EEOC, Jenny has more than lived up to my very high hopes for her. She has become a formidable force for equality, decency, and respect in the law. And she’s only just begun.”

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“Building bridges is what I do,” Gadsby said of her position at Scholastic, noting that she serves as a liaison between employees and employers. Indeed, it
is a theme throughout her work and life. Gadsby also emphasized the importance of building bridges outside of one’s personal career and making sure to give back by creating opportunities for others. “We are our sisters’ keepers, and I truly believe that we will rise or fall together,” she said. “Make a commitment to take one girl under your wing and serve as a mentor to her…. There’s no greater pleasure than being able to help another person succeed.”

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“There are zero electronic records in Myanmar, so if you walk into a clinic or lab, it’s all paper,” Lwin says. After his trip, Lwin stayed in touch with his cousin, and together they founded Koe Koe Tech, based in Yangon, to train local people in computer programming and develop software for the country’s health sector.

“What we’re trying to do is to collect data and consolidate it for doctors making health care decisions,” says Lwin. In addition to creating jobs for the local population and providing data for public health research, the company’s long-term goal is developing a nationwide health information exchange.

In recognition of their achievements, the cousins were recently named co-recipients of a 2014 Echoing Green Global Fellowship (Lauren Burke ’09, profiled in the 2013 NYU Law Magazine and founder of Atlas:DIY, is also a recipient). The fellowship supports emerging social entrepreneurs working to bring about positive social change. Erica Lock, associate director of the Echoing Green fellows program, calls Koe Koe Tech’s mission both important and timely. “Above all,” she says, “Mike’s resounding leadership, passion, and dedication to this work has placed him in an echelon of the highest-potential social entrepreneurs across the globe.”

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In a short time, the band known as Champagne Friday has become an endearing part of the Law School community. They performed at the 2014 Public Service Auction and for Student Bar Association Band Nights at the Red Lion and the Bitter End.

Keeping a band together under normal circumstances can be difficult, but rehearsing regularly while participating in student organizations, summer associate programs, and other activities is nearly impossible. “It’s pretty tricky,” says Aliaga. “It helps that we’re all very understanding.” Jondahl agrees: “Once you get it on your calendar that from 7:00 to 10:00 p.m. on Sundays this is where I am, you just start to plan around it.”

The band practices at a small studio in the East Village where Sonic Youth, David Bowie, and Third Eye Blind have all rehearsed, says Pernick. Their musical inspiration is as varied as their legal interests, ranging from the Clash to the Roots, from education law to intellectual property litigation. For that fateful Erie Day performance, they presented the Bob Dylan/Old Crow Medicine Show song “Wagon Wheel” with lines describing the majority opinion.

For now, and especially while they are full-time students, they are content being a cover band. “Our goal is to give our friends and colleagues who come to our shows a really great time,” says Pernick. And, he says, if all six remain in New York past graduation, the band will play on.

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“People don’t realize that what we do is consumer protection, competition, and enforcement,” Brill explains. As both a consumer watchdog and a barometer for market trends, the FTC, she says, “follows what’s happening to consumers, which is directly related to what’s happening in the economy.”

It’s a perfect position for Brill, who chose law over economics in order to realize her dream of shaping public policy. As she recounted when receiving the Law Women Alumna of the Year Award in February, Brill was inspired by Louis Brandeis, whose championship of local causes won him a national reputation, and she espouses a Yiddish proverb: “God created a world full of small worlds.”

“I found my small world in Vermont,” Brill says, having landed there after law school by clerking for Judge Franklin Billings Jr. of the US District Court for the District of Vermont. After a brief stint at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison to strengthen her practical experience, she returned to Vermont to work in the state attorney general’s office. “State AGs usually have relatively few attorneys compared to federal agencies, but they have a much broader mandate,” she explains, which gave her the chance to have a lot of responsibility early in her career.

Soon after joining Vermont’s Consumer Protection Unit, Brill was blitzed with complaints from people who were being rejected for mortgages and refinancing. The local issue—how big errors by big companies affected people in small towns—led to testimony before Congress and ultimately to substantial revisions in the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

That experience, in turn, took Brill to North Carolina, to head up the AG’s Consumer Protection Division and, from there, to her FTC appointment.

In 2010 the country was still reeling from the financial crisis, so much of Brill’s focus early on as commissioner was on what she calls “last-time frauds”—scams targeting people who have lost their jobs, are in danger of foreclosure, and, consequently, are susceptible to fraudulent claims of relief.

As the economy has started to improve and these kinds of frauds have slowed, Brill is turning to other issues. Paramount among them is parsing the privacy implications of emerging technologies: specifically, big data analytics (how personal data is gathered and used) and its effect on consumer privacy (think not only Target’s credit card security breach but also using personal data to influence decisions on health insurance coverage and loan approvals). Brill, who earlier this year was interviewed on 60 Minutes, is right in the thick of the conversation. Last year she launched Reclaim Your Name, a comprehensive initiative that would give consumers the knowledge and technological tools to reassert some control over their personal data.

In addition to privacy issues and consumer protection, Brill would like to see the FTC continue its focus on competition in health care. Citing a 2013 Supreme Court decision against the practice of pharmaceutical brands signing agreements with generic drug makers to delay the entry of those lower-cost brands, she says: “Moving forward, I want to see that what the Supreme Court said gets implemented in the lower courts and in the industry.”

An accomplished public speaker, Brill gives talks about privacy issues and big data several times a month. She relishes the pulpit the FTC provides to communicate complicated issues to the public and explain how these issues—and the FTC’s rulings—affect their lives. In her speech accepting the alumna award, Brill quoted “that sage of the workplace, Ferris Bueller”: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” It’s advice that she admits she doesn’t always follow herself.

But she’s not complaining. “Like every job, there are times you tear your hair out,” says Brill. “But most of the time, I feel like I’m eating strawberries and drinking champagne. I can’t believe I’m so privileged to do what I get to do.”

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Now, as the deputy attorney general for international law in Israel’s Ministry of Justice, Schöndorf is responsible for providing legal advice on all aspects of international law, including international litigation and treaty negotiations. His work is crucial to the current state of play of the Israeli government’s actions, both internally and abroad. In recent months, this has included providing advice in heightened security situations, such as confrontations between Israel and Hamas in Gaza this summer.

Schöndorf, 40, is relatively young to hold such a high position in the Israeli government; however, he already has an impressive record of working in the field of international law, with a particular focus on the negotiation of peace.

After receiving two LLBs and an MA in law and economics from Tel Aviv University, Schöndorf served as a senior legal adviser in the international law department of the Israeli Defense Forces Military Advocate General Unit. When Israelis and Syrians came together in 2000 in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, to negotiate the terms of a possible peace treaty, Schöndorf was part of the Israeli delegation.

It was a particularly significant experience for him on a personal level, he says, as someone who was born into the last war with Syria “to be able to be there and meet people that there was previously no way for an Israeli to meet, then…to meet them in person and be able to exchange views about the future of our region, of our children, of our countries.”

Later, while serving in the Israeli delegation to the assembly of states working on the formation of the International Criminal Court, Schöndorf became interested in writing a dissertation in the field of international criminal law. He came to NYU Law as a Fulbright and then Hauser Scholar, and wrote his dissertation under the direction of Professor Theodor Meron, who is now president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals.

Schöndorf returned to Israel in 2010, when he was asked to establish the Department of Special International Affairs, a new department in Israel’s Ministry of Justice. Daniel Geron LLM ’02, who began his studies at NYU Law at the same time as Schöndorf, and who is now the acting legal adviser for the National Security Council in the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office, describes Schöndorf’s meteoric rise in the field of international law as a result of the very high regard in which he is held across government ministries.

“Everyone recognizes that he understands the intricacies of international law, and the sensitivities of the issues, particularly well,” says Geron, “and he’s able to explain the complexities to the people who need to ultimately make the decisions.”

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