Professor Lea Shaver teaches at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law.
Attending the University of Chicago on a full-tuition merit scholarship, Shaver received a bachelor’s degree in sociology with high honors, graduating Phi Beta Kappa. She was also selected as a Marshall Scholar, the University of Chicago’s highest honor for undergraduate achievement. She also studied human rights and development in the University of Chicago’s Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences, completing both the bachelor’s and master’s degrees in four years.
Shaver received her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she served as both submissions and articles editor of the Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal, served as an officer of the Student-Faculty Alliance for Military Equality and participated in multiple clinics. Selected as a Coker Fellow in her third year, she taught legal research and writing for a first-year Constitutional Law seminar.
After graduation from Yale Law School, Shaver served as a summer clerk to the Honorable David F. Hamilton of the Southern District of Indiana (since promoted to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals). She departed for an appointment as a Fulbright Scholar to South Africa. Based at the University of Witwatersrand Law School’s Centre for Applied Legal Studies, she contributed to research and impact litigation advancing the rights to housing, education and water.
While in South Africa, Shaver helped to litigate two cases advancing the rights to water and housing, both of which established important precedents at South Africa’s Constitutional Court. She also drafted briefs for the plaintiffs in a landmark right to education case, resulting in an important vindication of the national policy on free primary education at the trial level.
In 2007, Shaver returned to Yale Law School as an Associate Research Scholar and Lecturer in Law. There she served as a resident fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, where she directed a research program in Access to Knowledge. As part of this work, Shaver oversaw research on intellectual property and development in seven countries, and organized a major conference on the theme of Access to Knowledge and Human Rights.
In 2010, Shaver joined the faculty of Hofstra Law School as an Associate Professor. During the 2010-2011 academic year, she taught Intellectual Property Survey, Patents, and Transnational Law.
Professor Shaver’s principal research interests include international intellectual property, law and technology, and human rights. Her work has been published in the Wisconsin Law Review, the Wisconsin International Law Journal and the Washington University Global Legal Studies Review, among other academic journals.
Shaver is the editor of Access to Knowledge in Brazil: New Research on Intellectual Property, Innovation and Development and the co-editor of Access to Knowledge in Egypt: New Research on Intellectual Property, Innovation and Development. All three books are available from Bloomsbury Academic on a Creative Commons license and may be downloaded in full text at the Social Sciences Research Network and on this site.
A partial list of Professor Shaver’s published research and works in progress may be found at http://ssrn.com/author=880999.