Jorge L. Contreras is an American legal scholar and attorney who is recognized as a leading global authority on intellectual property law, technical standardization and the law and policy of human genomics.
Early life and education
Contreras was born in Flushing, Queens, New York, and spend his childhood in South Florida and Texas. He attended Rice University in Houston, Texas. At Rice, Contreras held the elected offices of Rice Program Council (RPC) treasurer and Student Association treasurer, and was a member of the Marching Owl Band (MOB). During the summer of 1987 he studied English literature at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Contreras attended Harvard Law School from 1988 to 1991, where he earned his JD degree and served as an editor of the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology and worked for Professor Laurence Tribe.
Professional titles
Contreras currently holds the rank of Presidential Scholar and Professor of Law at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law, with an adjunct appointment in the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Utah School of Medicine. He also serves as a Senior Policy Fellow at American University Washington College of Law. He has held prior academic appointments at American University Washington College of Law (2011–13) and Washington University School of Law (2010-11). For the past two years Contreras has taught a short course on international patent licensing and litigation at the East China University for Political Science and Law in Shanghai (ECUPL{ { ) and served as a TILT/TILEC fellow at Tilburg University in the Netherlands during 2018.
Prior to entering academia, Contreras was a partner at the international law firm Wilmer, Cutler, Pickering, Hale and Dorr LLP, where he practiced transactional intellectual property law in Boston, MA, Washington, DC and London, UK. He clerked for Chief Justice Thomas R. Phillips of the Texas Supreme Court during the 1991-92 court term.
Scholarship and writing
Contreras's research focuses on patent and antitrust law, science policy, and technology standardization and innovation. He has edited eight scholarly books – two of which have been recognized by the UK-based IPKat blog as the “Best Patent Law Book of the Year”, and has published more than 100 academic articles and book chapters. His scholarship has appeared in Science, several Nature journals, Georgetown Law Journal, NYU Law Review, Iowa Law Review and other top-tier general and specialty law reviews, as well as peer-reviewed law and policy journals. He has been quoted in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Washington Post, Bloomberg and Politico, and has been featured on radio shows produced by NPR, PRI and BBC Contreras's writing has been translated into French, Chinese, Japanese and Korean and he has lectured and spoken in more than two dozen countries on six continents.
Patent Pledges
Contreras was a pioneer in systematically identifying, cataloging and studying the legal mechanisms by which patent holders voluntarily waive certain rights to enforce their patents for a range of commercial and altruistic reasons (a, b, c ). In 2020, building on this past theoretical work, Contreras helped to create the Open COVID Pledge (d, e ), a voluntary framework for the commitment of intellectual property rights to the COVID-19 response. To date, more than thirty corporations including Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Facebook, Amazon and Uber, together with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratory, have pledged an estimated 500,000 patents to this cause on a royalty-free basis. He is currently helping to launch a similar project – the Low Carbon Patent Pledge —in which companies have pledged several hundred patents to combat global climate change. There is little scientific evidence on whether patent pledges facilitate technology adoption, however, some studies suggest that they accelerate follow-on inventions.