Colleen Chien Research Priorities
Colleen V. Chien is Associate Professor of Law at Santa Clara University Law School and
researches and teaches in the fields of patent and international intellectual property law. Since
the fall of 2014, she has been serving as White House Senior Advisor to the Chief Technology
Officer, Intellectual Property and Innovation, at the White House Office of Science and
Technology Policy and in Spring 2015 will serve as a Visiting Fellow at Berkeley Law School.
Chien has conducted a variety of empirical studies of the functioning of the patent system,
including on the topics of patent litigation, “patent assertion entities” (a term she coined), and
the International Trade Commission. She is currently collaborating on a book on the institutions
and design of the patent system. More details are described below:
Current Projects Under Development
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Rethinking Patent Disclosure: One of the main reasons for having a patent system is
that patents disclose useful technical information that others can learn from. However,
patents aren’t performing this function well. Legal scholars and the courts have
responded with calls to improve the teachings within a patent as the “quid pro quo” for
exclusive rights. The problem with this approach is that it focus on improving the
technical content within the patent, rather than on the broader question of how patent
disclosures truly promote the progress. In this project I describe the ways in which
disclosures outside of the patent can and are already enhancing the patent system’s
diffusive role and discuss ways to reinvigorate the patent system’s disclosure function,
including by focusing on the context, rather than the content, of patents.
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University Inventions: (co-authored) What role is university patenting playing in
promoting the progress of the useful arts? In this empirical project we address this
question by exhaustively analyzing the ways in which university patenting has
performed according to a wide variety of metrics and provide suggestions for
policymakers seeking to enhance the impact and efficiency of university research.
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Resdesigning Patent Law: (co-authored) This book will focus on improving the function
of the patent system. Rather than focus exclusively on questions of legal doctrine, the
traditional focus of the legal academy, this book will also consider the institutional
design, procedure, and economics of patent law within broader innovation policy.
Selected Recent Publications
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Holding Up and Holding Out, 21 Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law
Review ___ (2014)
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The Santa Clara Patent Litigation Survey, with Daniel Dobkin, Wesley Helmholz, Coryn
Millslagle, John Neal, Nicole Shanahan, and Christopher Tosetti, 42 AIPLA Law
Quarterly___ (2014)
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Why Companies and Consumers Are Being Sued for Using Technology and What Can Be
Done, with Edward Reines 49 Wake Forest Law Review 235 (2014)
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Startups and Patent Trolls, 17 Stanford Technology Law Review 461 (2014)
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Startup Innovation and Patent Assertion, New America Foundation Open Technology
Initiative White Paper, (2013)