Stanford CIS

Christopher Sprigman

Affiliate Scholar

Chris Sprigman is an Associate Professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, where he teaches intellectual property law, antitrust law, competition policy, and comparative constitutional law. His scholarship focuses on how legal rules affect innovation and the deployment of new technologies. Sprigman received his B.A. with honors from the University of Pennsylvania in 1988. He attended the University of Chicago Law School, graduating with honors in 1993. At Chicago he served as an editor of the University of Chicago Law Review. Following graduation, Sprigman clerked for the Honorable Stephen Reinhardt of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and for Justice Lourens H. W. Ackermann of the Constitutional Court of South Africa. Sprigman also taught at the law school of the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, South Africa. From 1999 to 2001, Sprigman served as Appellate Counsel in the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, where he worked on U.S. v. Microsoft, among other matters. Sprigman then joined the Washington, D.C. office of King & Spalding LLP, where he was elected a partner. In 2003, Sprigman left law practice to become a Residential Fellow at the Center for Internet & Society at Stanford Law School. Sprigman joined the UVA law faculty in 2005.

Recent articles

Press

Sometimes a Rip-Off Is Just a Rip-Off

"“The way I saw this, it’s wholesale taking of copyrighted material,” says Christopher Sprigman, an NYU law professor who shares the copyleft point of view…

Publication

How to Copy Right

Cross-posted from Foreign Affairs. PATENT PROGRESS In their essay “Fake It Till You Make It” (July/August 2013), Kal Raustiala and Christopher Sprigman urged…

Publication

FISA Court Rolls Over, Plays Dead

Cross-posted from Forbes. A newly declassified opinion shows FISA court “oversight” in the face of egregious, unconstitutional and potentially criminal governm…

Blog

Secret FISA Court Must Go

Chris Sprigman and I have a new piece up at The Daily Beast about NSA illegal mass surveillance. This time we're looking at the role of the secret FISA Cour…