Courses Taught

Patent Law
Advanced Patent Law
Trademark Law
Law and Architecture
Cumulative Invention and Creativity (seminar)
Survey of Intellectual Property

Profile

Professor Kevin Emerson Collins is a well known patent scholar who frequently uses an interdisciplinary lens to shed new light on patent law. For example, he has explored how the philosophy of language explains the reach of patent rights into after-arising technology; how semiotics facilitates the reconceptualization of the long-standing, yet poorly understood “printed matter doctrine” of patent law; and how the philosophy of mind offers insights into the economics of allowing newly invented human thought to be eligible for patent protection. Professor Collins speaks at intellectual property conferences, panels, and workshops across the United States and overseas, and he teaches lecture classes and seminars that span the intellectual-property spectrum. A licensed architect, Professor Collins is also interested in pioneering the field of “law and architecture”—the study of how the built environment (“architecture”) affects individual and group behavior and how, in turn, law might opt to regulate the construction of the built environment to harness its behavior-sculpting capacity—in the legal academy. Before law school, Professor Collins earned a bachelor’s degree in molecular biophysics and biochemistry from Yale College and a master’s degree in Architecture from Columbia University. He then worked as a lead designer and project architect for Bernard Tschumi Architects of New York City and Paris, France. After earning his law degree, he clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, while she served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York City, and for the Hon. Raymond C. Clevenger on the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C.