UH Law School announces new faculty member to teach intellectual property law

Charles E. Colman

Charles E. Colman will join the faculty of the William S. Richardson School of Law at UH Mānoa in August as an Assistant Professor, teaching courses on intellectual property law and other business-related subjects.

Colman comes from New York University School of Law, where he spent three years as an Acting Assistant Professor of Lawyering. He also served as a Faculty Fellow in NYU’s Program on Visual Culture: Costume Studies, where he created and taught a yearly, semester-long course on histories and theories of dress.

Colman’s scholarship explores issues at the nexus of intellectual property law, visual culture, identity and power.  His work has been published in the Harvard Law Review Forum, the Harvard Journal of Sports and Entertainment Law, Jurimetrics: The Journal of Law, Science, and Technology, and the University of Pennsylvania Law Review Online.  His first book, revealing the gendered moral undercurrents of U.S. design law, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2017.

UH Law Dean Avi Soifer said that the UH Law School is delighted to welcome Colman. “Chuck brings us important practical expertise in intellectual property and business law as well as what is already an impressive scholarly publication record," said Soifer.  "We were fortunate to land him and anticipate great things from Professor Colman on many levels.”

Before entering the legal academy, Colman practiced IP law at his own New York-based firm, Charles Colman Law PLLC, overseeing transactional and litigation matters for clients in the fields of fashion, film, media and new technology. Previously, he worked as a Litigation Associate at the New York law firm Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler. He received his JD from Columbia Law School (James Kent Scholar, Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar) and his BA in Linguistics (cum laude, distinction in major) from Yale College.

Colman said he is excited to join the UH community and looks forward to sharing his enthusiasm for intellectual property law with the students at Richardson, “especially at a time when IP has become an important topic of discussion in Hawai‘i and the Asia-Pacific region.”

He added that his longtime interest in diverse cultures and languages makes Hawai‘i a particularly appealing place to continue his career.

For more information, visit: https://www.law.hawaii.edu/