Daniel Gervais - Biography#

Daniel J. Gervais is the FedEx Research Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University Law School and Co-director of the Vanderbilt Intellectual Property Program.

Prior to joining Vanderbilt, he was the Acting Dean, University Research Chair in Intellectual Property and Osler Professor of Law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Ottawa (Common Law Section) in Canada. Before joining the Academy, he was successively Legal Officer at the GATT (now WTO); Head of Section at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO); and Vice-President, International of Massachusetts-based Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC). He also served as consultant to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris.

He is Editor-in-Chief of the peer-reviewed Journal of World Intellectual Property and the author of books, book chapters and articles published in six different languages.

He studied computer science and law at McGill University and the University of Montreal, where he obtained LL.B. and LL.M. degrees. He also received a Diploma summa cum laude from the Institute of Advanced International Studies in Geneva and a doctorate magna cum laude from the University of Nantes (France).

He has been a visiting professor and lecturer at several universities in Europe, including the Institut de Sciences Politiques (Paris), and the Universities of Grenoble, Montpellier (twice), Nantes, and Strasbourg (twice) in France, and at the university of Liège in Belgium. In 2004 he was a visiting scholar at Stanford Law School and in 2006 he was the Trilateral Distinguished Scholar at Michigan State University.

He is a member of the Law Society of Upper Canada (Ontario) and of the Bar of Quebec. He speaks, writes and teaches in English, French and Spanish and has functional knowledge of German and basic knowledge of Dutch and Mandarin Chinese. He has received research grants from the Melbourne-Vanderbilt Partnership; the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSRHC); the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation; the University of Ottawa; and private foundations (including Bell Laboratories).

Full CV