Collins, Kevin E.

Kevin Emerson Collins is a Professor of Law at Washington University School of Law and Director of Washington University’s Intellectual Property and Technology Law Program. He is a nationally recognized expert on intellectual property law in general and patent law in particular. His scholarship addresses topics such as when patents should grant inventors control over technology that was not developed at the time their patents were filed, whether the discovery of new biomarkers and medical diagnostics should be patent eligible, and how the functional nature of software complicates the use of conventional patent doctrines to curtail the permissible scope of claims to software inventions. He has published work in leading law reviews, including the University of Chicago Law Review, the Vanderbilt Law Review, and the Washington University Law Review. He is currently working on a book project for Cambridge University Press on intellectual property protection for architecture that addresses both the protection to which architects are entitled under four different intellectual property regimes and architects’ curious nonuse of much of that protection.

Professor Collins received his bachelor’s degree from Yale University, with a double major in architecture and molecular biophysics and biochemistry. He graduated with a Master of Architecture degree from the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University, and worked on projects in France and the United States as a project architect for Bernard Tschumi Architects. He attended law school at Stanford University before clerking for (then) Judge Sonia Sotomayor on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and for Judge Raymond Clevenger III on the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. He began his career as a legal academic at Indiana University Maurer School of Law in Bloomington.