Key Personnel

Professor Hugh Hansen – Director

Prof. Hansen teaches trademark, copyright, advanced copyright, EU intellectual property, and U.S. constitutional law. He is also founder and director of the Fordham Annual Conference on Intellectual Property Law and Policy.

After graduation from the Georgetown University Law Center, where he was a member of the Georgetown Law Journal, Prof. Hansen clerked in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He was in practice with the law firm of Dewey Ballantine in New York, where he specialized in antitrust litigation, and then as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York. Since coming to Fordham in 1978, Prof. Hansen has served numerous times as a consultant or expert witness in IP cases in U.S., Europe and the EU Commission. He has also been the lead counsel in copyright and trademark actions.

Prof. Hansen is a frequent speaker on 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, and delivered the Herschel Smith Public Lecture in Intellectual Property Law at Queen Mary University of London.

In August 2003, under the auspices of the Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia (IPRIA), Prof. Hansen gave a series of addresses on intellectual property law at universities in Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane and Sydney. In June 2004, he addressed U.S. and international IP law issues in a series of addresses and round-table discussions in Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Fukuoka and Nagoya in academic, governmental and think-tank settings. He has appeared or been quoted numerous times in the media including ABC’s 20/20; IPR’s On the Media, the Economist and the New York Times.

Prof. Hansen is the Intellectual Property Editor of Preview, an American Bar Association publication. Matthew Bender/Lexis Nexis published the 2007 edition of his book, New York Intellectual Property Handbook. He is editor of International Intellectual Property Law and Policy, Volumes 1B7 (Juris Publications), and of U.S. Intellectual Property Law and Policy (2006) (Edward Elgar Publishing).

Dr. Sandra Sherman – Assistant Director

Sandra is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and completed an LL.M cum laude in Intellectual Property Law and Information Technology at Fordham 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), Imagining Poverty: Quantification and the Decline of Paternalism (Ohio State U.P., 2001), and Inventing the Modern Cookbook (forthcoming from Greenwood, 2010). She is also author of over 60 articles on literature, economics, and culinary history, and has lectured around the world. She is also an Adjunct Professor of English at Fordham, teaching course son literary history.

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.