Lisa Ouellette in Peru

Lisa Ouellette, who joined Stanford’s faculty in 2014, is the Deane F. Johnson Professor of Law and a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. With training in both science and law, she is an internationally recognized scholar whose work on innovation and intellectual property spans both U.S. and global policy. The author of more than sixty scholarly articles, she writes and teaches about how societies encourage the creation of new knowledge, how they determine its ownership, and who benefits from its use.

On this trip, she will explore these policy questions using tangible examples drawn from our adventure. Lisa says, “I’m excited to travel with you to Peru because it is a place where abstract debates about knowledge ownership come to life. Its national tree, the cinchona, changed the world as the source of the antimalarial drug quinine. Peru also adopted one of the first legal regimes for protecting indigenous collective knowledge and created a national commission to fight biopiracy.” She will discuss topics at the intersection of traditional knowledge and modern intellectual property law, such as Peru’s challenges to foreign patents on Andean crops and the return of traditional potato varieties; the cultural-property and repatriation disputes involving artifacts removed from Machu Picchu; and how both law and social norms shape the ownership and export of traditional culture and designs.

• At Stanford: Deane F. Johnson Professor of Law; Associate Dean for Research and Intellectual Life at Stanford Law School; Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research

• Recipient of the John Bingham Hurlbut Award for Excellence in Teaching

• Elected member of the American Law Institute

• J.D., Yale Law School

• Ph.D., Physics, Cornell University

• B.A., Physics, Swarthmore College