William R. Cornish Biography#

William R. Cornish has recently retired as Herchel Smith Professor of Intellectual Property Law at Cambridge University and has been President of Magdalene College.

A graduate of Adelaide and Oxford Universities, with an LL.D. from Cambridge, he is a QC and Bencher of Gray's Inn. He became a Fellow of the British Academy in 1984 and has recently chaired its Law Section. In the IP field is a generalist. As Professor of English Law at the London School of Economics (University of London) from 1970-1990 he was the first to develop the teaching of intellectual property law in a British law school. He continued this work on appointment to a Chair of Law at Cambridge University from 1990-2004. He is also an External Academic Member of the Max-Planck-Institut für Patent-, Urheber- und Wettbewerbsrecht, Munich and an Editor of the Institute's journal, International Review for Intellectual Property and Competition Law.

William R. Cornish also helped to pioneer the study and teaching of modern legal history in England and has in his time taught various other subjects, notably, restitution. He has been Chairman of the British Literary and Artistic Copyright Association and is a Vice-President of the international society, ALAI, of which it is the British constituent; President of the International Association for Teaching and Research in Intellectual Property; founding member of the Council of the Intellectual Property Institute, London; chairman of the Intellectual Property Working Party of the National Academies Policy Action Group; Specialist Adviser to the House of Lords Committee on EC Legislation on trade marks and patents, and accordingly draftsman of two reports on these subjects; founding member of the Editorial Board of the European Intellectual Property Review; founding director of the Centre for European Legal Studies and the Centre for IP and Information Law in the Cambridge Law Faculty. He has acted as an arbitrator and a domain name panellist at the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Centre. Since 1992 he has been Academic Director of the British Law Centre in the University of Warsaw, which teaches extended courses in English and EU Law through various universities in Central Europe.