Our People

Prof. Hugh Hansen – Director
Hugh C. Hansen teaches courses in U.S. and EU intellectual property law. For 25 years he also taught U.S. constitutional law.

Professor Hansen is the founder and director of the Fordham Intellectual Property Law Institute and the Fordham Annual Conference on Intellectual Property Law and Policy, now in its nineteenth year. Managing Intellectual Property magazine has denominated him as one of the 50 most influential people in IP in the world.

After graduation from Georgetown Law School where he was a member of the Law Journal, Prof. Hansen clerked for Judge Inzer B. Wyatt in the Southern District of New York and Judge Murray I. Gurfein in the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He was also a litigation associate with Dewey Ballantine and an Assistant United States Attorney in the criminal division of the Southern District of New York. Since coming to Fordham, Prof. Hansen has served numerous times as a consultant or expert witness in intellectual property litigations in U.S., Europe and the European Commission. He has also been the lead counsel in copyright and trademark actions.

Prof. Hansen speaks frequently on U.S. and international intellectual property law in the United States, Europe and Asia. He delivered the 30th Annual Brace Lecture of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. entitled “Copyright and the Culture of the Public Domain: A Critical Analysis.” He delivered the Herchel Smith Public Lecture in Intellectual Property Law at Queen Mary, University of London entitled “A Legal Realist Analysis of U.S. Trademark Law with Comparisons to Recent Developments in the European Union.”

Under the auspices of the Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia (IPRIA), Prof. Hansen gave a series of addresses on aspects of intellectual property law at universities in Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane and Sydney. In Japan he addressed U.S. and international Intellectual property law issues in addresses in Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Fukuoka and Nagoya in academic, governmental and think-tank settings. He was a visiting professor at Melbourne University and a visiting professorial fellow at Queen Mary Research Institute in London.

Prof. Hansen has been quoted often in the media including The Economist, New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, and has appeared on 20/20 (ABC), CNN, WABC, WNBC and On the Media (NPR).

Prof. Hansen is the author of New York Intellectual Property Law (LexisNexis 2010), the editor of International Intellectual Property Law and Policy, Volumes 1-7 (Juris Publications) Volumes 10 & 11 (Hart Publishing), and U.S. Intellectual Property Law and Policy (2006) (Edward Elgar Publishing, UK).

Dr. Sandra Sherman – Assistant Director
Sandra is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and completed an LL.M in Intellectual Property Law and Information Technology at Fordham cum laude in December, 2008. She also holds a Ph.D. in English from Penn. Sandra was an attorney for several years in the U.S. Department of Energy, where she specialized in international and administrative law, and has held legal positions in the Justice Department and Department of State. Before joining the Institute, she was a professor at the University of Arkansas and Georgia State University, where she specialized in 18th century British literature and culture. She was President of the South Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Sandra is the author of four books, including Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe (Cambridge U.P., 1996), and Imagining Poverty: Quantification and the Decline of Paternalism (Ohio State U.P., 2001). She is also author of over 60 articles on literature, economics, and culinary history, and has lectured around the world. Her latest book is Invention of the Modern Cookbook (May, 2010). She is an Adjunct Professor of English at Fordham, teaching courses on literary history and Advanced Composition, and an Adjunct Professor at the Law School, where she is teaching a course on the development of Copyright theory.

Sandra has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew Mellon Foundation. She was a Visiting Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge University, and the Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin-Madison. She was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard.