Jennifer Jenkins is the Director of Duke's Center for the Study of the Public Domain and a Clinical Professor of Law at Duke Law School, where she teaches courses on Intellectual Property, Music Copyright, and Trademark and Unfair Competition.
Her work has focused on the legal and technological conditions that drive cultural production, and the need for a delicate balance between the incentives provided by intellectual property and the freedoms provided by the public domain. She is the co-author (with James Boyle) of the open coursebook Intellectual Property: Cases and Materials (4th ed, 2018) and two comic books: Theft! A History of Music, a 2000-year history of musical borrowing and regulation, and Bound By Law?, a comic book about copyright, fair use and documentary film. Her articles include In Ambiguous Battle: The Promise (and Pathos) of Public Domain Day and Last Sale? Libraries' Rights in the Digital Age. She is currently working on Music Copyright, Creativity, and Culture, a book examining music’s complex and increasingly fraught relationship with copyright law, forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2020. Jenkins received her J.D. from Duke Law School, M.A. in English from Duke University, and B.A. from Rice University. While in practice, she was a member of the team that defended the copyright infringement suit against the publisher of the novel The Wind Done Gone (a parodic rejoinder to Gone with the Wind). She is a frequent commentator on intellectual property and the public domain, with recent appearances on 1A, NPR’s Weekend Edition and All Things Considered, and CBS This Morning, and in The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, The Economist, and The Times of London.
