Graeme Austin

Prof Graeme Austin

Chair in Private Law
School of Law
address

BA(Hons) LLB, LLM Well, LLM, JSD Col

Profile

Wellington born and bred, Professor Graeme Austin rejoined the law faculty of Victoria University of Wellington in 2010, after serving for nearly ten years as a tenured professor at the University of Arizona, most recently as the J Byron McCormick Professor of Law. With first law degrees from Victoria University of Wellington (LLB, LLM), Professor Austin also graduated LLM and JSD from Columbia University, where he was awarded the Burton Fellowship in Intellectual Property. Prior to his Arizona appointment, he was a senior solicitor at the national law firm of Chapman Tripp. Professor Austin's scholarship has been published in the Law Quarterly Review, NYU's Annual Survey of American Law, the Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, and the International Review of Intellectual Property and Competition Law. His most recent book, Human Rights and Intellectual Property: Mapping the Global Interface (co-authored with Prof Larry Helfer, (Duke)), was published by Cambridge University Press in 2011. Regularly invited to speak on legal issues in a wide variety of university and public- and private-sector settings, he has made presentations and delivered lectures at the World Intellectual Property Organization, the Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia, the Colegio Público de Abogados de la Capital Federal (Buenos Aires), Columbia University Law School, New York University Law School and Oxford University (St Peter's). In 2010, Professor Austin was invited by Cambridge University to deliver the 5th Annual Hercel Smith Lecture on International Intellectual Property (Emmanuel College). He has been a visiting professor at a number of academic institutions, most recently at the University of WuHan School of Law (China). An elected member of the American Law Institute, Professor Austin served on the panel of advisors for its Project on Intellectual Property, Principles Governing Jurisdiction, Choice of Law, and Judgments in Transnational Disputes (2008). He serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of the Copyright Society (USA) and the Media and Arts Law Review (Australia). He also holds a fractional appointment at Melbourne University Law School.

Areas of Supervision

• Copyright
• Trade Marks
• General Intellectual Property
• General Civil Obligations

Current Research

Current research includes: a project on the relationship between privacy and copyright; a project exploring distributive justice issues in the context of tech transfer contracts; an examination of the conceptual bases for the regulation of consumer debt.

Selection of Publications

Human Rights and Intellectual Property: Mapping the Global Interface (co-author with Laurence Helfer) (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011) pp 568.

"The Concept of Justiciability in Foreign Copyright Infringement Cases" (2009) 40 International Review of Intellectual Property and Competition Law 393.

View all Publications