Prof. Jorge L. Contreras

Jorge L. Contreras is the James T. Jensen Endowed Professor for Transactional Law and Director of the Program on Intellectual Property and Technology Law at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Human Genetics, University of Utah School of Medicine.  He has served as a visiting fellow to the London School of Economics and Political Science (2023) and Tilburg University (2018), and will serve as a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota in 2024. Professor Contreras’s research focuses on intellectual property, technical standards, antitrust law and science policy. He is the editor or author of twelve books and more than 150 scholarly articles and chapters.  Professor Contreras has appeared before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, the Federal Trade Commission and the European Commission, and as an expert witness before courts across North America, South America and Europe.  During his career he has served on advisory committees of the US National Institutes of Health, the National Academies of Science, and as Co-Chair of the National Conference of Lawyers and Scientists. Professor Contreras’s award-winning book, The Genome Defense: Inside the Epic Legal Battle to Determine Who Owns Your DNA (NY: Hachette/Algonquin, 2021), which has received praise from media outlets from the New York Times and Wall St. Journal to Nature and STAT, describes the landmark civil rights litigation that ended gene patenting in America.  He is an honors graduate of Harvard Law School (JD) and Rice University (BSEE, BA), and an elected member of the American Law Institute.