I am a Professor of Law at William & Mary Law School, where I teach Torts, Intellectual Property, Property, among others. I am also director of William & Mary’s Property Rights Project. My official bio is here.
My scholarship chiefly centers on the structure of private law, with an emphasis on property and intellectual property, including patent, copyright, trademark, and trade secrecy laws, as well as related issues in privacy and information policy. I also have interests in cybersecurity, national security, and cryptocurrency issues. Though my work is somewhat eclectic, broadly speaking I’m interested in the role of doctrinal and conceptual analysis within a legal system whose primary orientation is instrumentalist.
Before coming to William & Mary, I was Research Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, where I also earned my law degree. I received my undergraduate degree from Harvard. I was a law clerk to Justice Anthony Kennedy at the U.S. Supreme Court and to Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson on the U.S. Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit.
Outside academia, I served as Deputy General Counsel at the U.S. Treasury Department from 2019 to 2021, where I worked on a wide range of issues—including cryptocurrency, financial regulation, housing finance, national security matters, and tax law and policy—and was responsible for major Departmental litigation.
I’ve also assisted private sector counsel involved in appeals and matters related to my academic expertise, including a successful Supreme Court cert. petition and subsequent merits briefing that resulted in a $150 million enhanced damages award for patent infringement.
Please feel free to contact me by email or by phone at (757) 221-1341.
Official Bio SSRN academia.edu
Publications
The Primacy of Equality and the Nature of Things, 16 Jurisprudence 839 (2025).
What Did Gitlow Do?, 6 J. Free Speech L. 727 (2025).
Possession, Use, and Exclusion, in Handbook on Property Law & Theory (Chris Bevan ed., Elgar 2024).
Intellectual Property & The Myth of Nonrivalry, 99 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1163 (2024).
Analog Analogies: Intel v. Hamidi and the Future of Trespass to Chattels, 16 J. Tort L. 205 (2023) (with Maureen E. Brady).
First Amendment Lochnerism & the Origins of the Incorporation Doctrine, 2020 U. Ill. L. Rev. 1501.
Right on Time: First Possession in Property and Intellectual Property Law, 99 B.U. L. Rev. 395 (2019) (with Dotan Oliar).
Subject of symposium published at 100 B.U. L. Rev. Online 1 (2020).
What is the Right to Exclude and Why Does It Matter?, in Property Theory: Legal And Political Perspectives (M.H. Otsuka & J.E. Penner eds., Cambridge University Press 2018).
Property, Intellectual Property, and Regulation, in The Cambridge Handbook of Classical Liberal Thought (M. Todd Henderson ed., Cambridge University Press 2018).
The Essential Structure of Property Law, 115 Mich. L. Rev. 1167 (2017).
The Positive Law Model of the Fourth Amendment, 129 Harv. L. Rev. 1821 (2016) (with William Baude).
Cited in Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. ___ (2018) (opinions of Thomas & Gorsuch, JJ.), and discussed at oral argument in Byrd v. United States, 584 U.S. ___ (2018).
ABC v. Aereo and the Humble Judge, 9 NYU J.L.Liberty 81 (2015).
Sovereignty, Territoriality, and the Enforcement of Foreign Judgments, in Foreign Court Judgments and The United States Legal System 13 (Paul Stephan ed., Brill 2014) (with George Rutherglen).
Reprinted as Суверенитет, территориальность, и исполнение решений иностранных судов in ВЕСТНИК ГРАЖДАНСКОГО ПРОЦЕССА, 2014, no. 3, at 132 (Rus.).
Property, Exclusivity, and Jurisdiction, 100 Va. L. Rev. 111 (2014).
Property’s Constitution, 101 Cal. L. Rev. 277 (2013).
Reprinted in International Library of Comparative Law: Comparative Property Law (Antonio Gambaro ed., Edward Elgar 2017).
Choice of Law, The Constitution and Lochner, 94 Va. L. Rev. 1509 (2008).
Prof. James Y. Stern 