Christopher J. Buccafusco

Christopher J. Buccafusco is the Edward & Ellen Schwarzman Distinguished Professor of Law at Duke University School of Law. His research focuses on creativity, innovation, intellectual property, and the application of empirical social science to law.

Buccafusco uses experimental and other empirical methods to study innovation markets and intellectual property policy. His work addresses copyright, patent, trademark, and design law, including issues involving artificial intelligence, music copyright, pharmaceutical patents, and industrial design. He has also studied how research on well-being and human behavior can inform intellectual property, tort, criminal, and administrative law.

Buccafusco is co-author, with John Bronsteen and Jonathan Masur, of “Happiness and the Law.” He co-organizes an annual workshop on empirical methods in intellectual property with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law and serves as co-editor of the Social Science Research Network’s Intellectual Property: Empirical Studies eJournal and an editor of JOTWELL’s intellectual property section.

Before joining Duke in 2022, Buccafusco was a professor at Yeshiva University’s Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, where he served as associate dean for faculty development and director of the Intellectual Property & Information Law Program. He previously taught at Chicago-Kent College of Law, where he co-directed the Center for Empirical Studies of Intellectual Property, and at the University of Illinois College of Law.

Buccafusco has received teaching awards at Duke and Chicago-Kent, including a university-wide award for excellence in teaching from the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Buccafusco earned a J.D. from the University of Georgia School of Law, a master’s in the history of culture from the University of Chicago, and a bachelor’s in science, technology, and culture from the Georgia Institute of Technology.