Jack I. Lerner
Director, UCI Intellectual Property, Arts, & Technology Clinic
University of California, Irvine School of Law
Jack Lerner works to find solutions to problems at the intersection of law and technology, particularly how technology law and policy affect creative expression and innovation. He has written and spoken widely on copyright, privacy and other areas of technology law. Professor Lerner is a Clinical Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law and Director of the UCI Intellectual Property, Arts, and Technology Clinic. In the Clinic, law students counsel and represent policymakers, artists, innovators, nonprofit organizations, and others on a range of IP and technology issues. Among other accomplishments, under Professor Lerner's supervision students have obtained exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act on behalf of a wide coalition of documentary filmmakers that is helping filmmakers exercise their fair use rights, and worked with policymakers in the developing world to conduct a major study of copyright limitations and exceptions among Pacific Rim economies. In 2016, Professor Lerner was named “California Lawyer Attorney of the Year” for his work obtaining changing copyright law in ways that affect documentary filmmakers and authors nationwide. Read more about the award.
Before joining UC Irvine School of Law in 2014, Professor Lerner was Clinical Professor of Law at the USC Gould School of Law and Director of the USC Intellectual Property and Technology Law Clinic, and he was a Clinic Fellow at the Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy Clinic at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.
Since 2008, Professor Lerner has been Executive Editor of the award-winning treatise Internet Law and Practice in California (CEB). Among Professor Lerner's recent publications are Secondary Copyright Infringement Liability and User-Generated Content in the United States, in Oxford Handbook of Online Intermediary Liability (Giancarlo Frosio ed., 2020) and Law Enforcement Investigations Involving Journalists, in National Security Leaks, Whistleblowers, and the Media (Paul Rosenzweig et al, eds.) (with Bar-Nissim). See more of Professor Lerner's publications at his UC Irvine profile.
Professor Lerner received a B.A., with distinction, in English from the University of Kansas and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He clerked for Judge Fred I. Parker on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Judge G. Thomas Van Bebber in the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas. He practiced IP law with the Palo Alto, Calif., firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, P.C.