Sepehr Shahshahani
Associate Professor of Law
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Sepehr Shahshahani teaches and writes in the areas of intellectual property, civil procedure, and law and social science. His research often applies formal and quantitative methods to the study of law. It has investigated, for example, the impact of judges’ religious affiliation on their decisions; the interaction of interest groups, Congress, and the courts in making technology policy; the effect of appellate standards of review on factfinding and lawmaking; the horizontal diffusion of legal doctrine; the effect of patents on follow-on innovation; and the relationship between economic concentration and the concentration of lobbying power.
His work has appeared or is forthcoming in leading peer-reviewed journals and law reviews, including the Journal of Law and Economics, the Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization, the Journal of Legal Studies, the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, the Cornell Law Review, and the N.Y.U. Law Review. Sepehr completed a Ph.D. at Princeton University, where he was a Charlotte Elizabeth Procter Honorific Fellow. Before embarking on an academic career, he was a litigator at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison LLP in New York and a law clerk to Judge William E. Smith of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island and Judge Ronald Lee Gilman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
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Representative Publications
When Hard Cases Make Bad Law: A Theory of How Case Facts Affect Judge-Made Law, 110 Cornell Law Review (forthcoming 2024).
The Missing Element in Trademark Infringement (with Maggie Wittlin), 110 Iowa Law Review (forthcoming 2024).Testing Political Antitrust (with Nolan McCarty), 98 N.Y.U. Law Review (forthcoming 2023).
Hard Cases Make Bad Law? A Theoretical Investigation, 51 Journal of Legal Studies 133 (2022).
Coordination and Innovation in Judiciaries: Correct Law vs. Consistent Law (with Charles Cameron and Mehdi Shadmehr), 17 Quarterly Journal of Political Science 61 (2022).
The Fact-Law Distinction: Strategic Factfinding and Lawmaking in a Judicial Hierarchy, 37 Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization 440 (2021)
The Role of Courts in Technology Policy, 61 Journal of Law & Economics 37 (2018).
Religion and Judging on the Federal Courts of Appeals (with Lawrence Liu), 14 Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 716 (2017).
The Nirvana Fallacy in Fair Use Reform, 16 Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology 273 (2015).
The Design of Useful Article Exclusion: A Way Out of the Mess, 57 Journal of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. 859 (2010).