Overview

The Juelsgaard Intellectual Property and Innovation Clinic provides an opportunity for students to advocate on behalf of clients for the development and application of intellectual property law and regulatory policies that maximize the underlying goals of those laws and regulations:  promoting innovation, creativity and generativity.  Students represent important stakeholders such as national and regional non-profit organizations; associations of innovators, entrepreneurs, technology users and consumers; groups of technologists or legal academics; and occasionally individual inventors, start-ups, journalists, or researchers. 

Join Us in 2015-16

Are you interested in influencing important policy decisions by crafting amicus briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court or circuit or trial courts; or by submitting nuanced comments to agencies and other policymakers like the Copyright Office, FDA or PTO; or by providing guidance to researchers, startups and non-profits; or in a variety of other ways?  If so, and you are a rising SLS 2L or 3L, you can register now (until June 18) for enrollment in the Juelsgaard Clinic next winter or spring. Check out our last year's annual report or the details of our students' accomplishments on our Facebook page for more info.  If you have questions about the Clinic, feel free to contact Phil Malone (pmalone@law.stanford.edu) or Jef Pearlman (jef@law.stanford.edu).  

What We Do

Click here to read about some of the Clinic's recent major projects and the terrific work of our dedicated students. For the latest news on Clinic activities, visit and Like our Clinic Facebook page.

Juelsgaard Clinic in the News

The latest issue of Stanford Lawyer Magazine features a profile of the Juelsgaard Clinic and some of our students' great work last year.  More details on the Clinic's first year are in  our first Annual Report.

Students in the clinic are immersed in the vital role lawyers play in developing sophisticated and interdisciplinary public policy through tools that may include:

• amicus briefs;

• comments or testimony in rulemaking and regulatory proceedings, such as comments to the Copyright Office on DMCA Section 1201 exemptions or copyright reform; to the FDA on genetic testing, personalized medicine or mobile medical technologies; to the FCC on net neutrality; to the PTO or OSTP on issues such as open access, privacy or open data; to the FTC as part of IP and innovation hearings and reports, and more;

• comments or testimony on proposed legislation; and

• public whitepapers, policy analyses or other “best practices” documents. 

Recent projects (click here for more detailed descriptions) include amicus briefs to the Supreme Court, Second and Ninth Circuits and federal district courts; major comments to the Copyright Office and the FDA, a policy paper on behalf of tech startups advocating for net neutrality at the FCC; a public whitepaper explaining alternative, innovation-friendly patent licensing practices; counseling individual clients whose anonymity was threatened in a patent lawsuit, and more.

In all these settings, the clinic’s core mission is foster innovation by advancing a regulatory climate that is appropriately sensitive to the ways in which law—whether through litigation, legislation, or regulation—can serve to promote (or frustrate) the inventiveness, creativity, and entrepreneurship that provide the real engine for economic growth.