Christopher B. Seaman Robert E.R. Huntley Professor of Law

Phone: 540-458-8520

Email: seamanc@wlu.edu

Office: 475 Lewis Hall 

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Area of Expertise

Intellectual Property, Election Law

Education

BA, Swarthmore College

JD, University of Pennsylvania

About

Christopher B. Seaman joined the Washington and Lee law faculty in 2012.  His research and teaching interests include intellectual property, property, and civil procedure, with a particular focus on intellectual property litigation and remedies for the violation of intellectual property rights. 

Professor Seaman's intellectual property-related scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in a variety of law reviews and journals, including the Yale Law Journal, Virginia Law Review, the Iowa Law Review, the Washington Law Review, the Wake Forest Law Review, the BYU Law Review, the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, the Yale Journal of Law and Technology, and the Berkeley Technology Law Journal. His empirical study of willful patent infringement and enhanced damages was selected as a winner of the Samsung-Stanford Patent Prize competition for outstanding new scholarship related to patent remedies, and his co-authored article on patent injunctions at the Federal Circuit was chosen as a winner of the Federalist Society's Young Legal Scholars Paper Competition.

In addition, Professor Seaman has an interest in voting rights and election law, having written several works on the history, constitutionality, and potential future of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

Professor Seaman was selected by the Student Bar Association as Faculty Member of the Year for 2013-2014.  He received the John W. Elrod Law Alumni Faculty Fellowship for Teaching in both 2014 and 2019 and was named an Ethan Allen Faculty Fellow for scholarship in 2015. From 2017-2023, Professor Seaman served as Director of the Frances Lewis Law Center, W&L Law's in-house center supporting faculty research and scholarship and enriching the intellectual life of the Law School community.

Professor Seaman received his B.A. in 2000 from Swarthmore College and his J.D. in 2004 from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where he was an Executive Editor of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review and a recipient of the Edwin R. Keedy Award.  After a judicial clerkship with the Honorable R. Barclay Surrick of the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, he practiced intellectual property law at Sidley Austin LLP in Chicago from 2005-2009, where he represented clients in patent, copyright, trademark and trade secret litigation in federal and state courts.  Prior to joining Washington and Lee's faculty, Professor Seaman was a Visiting Assistant Professor at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law and an adjunct professor at Loyola University Chicago School of Law.

Recent Publications

Intellectual Property and Tabletop Games: A Case Study in Law and Innovation, Iowa Law Review (2022) (with Thuan Tran).

Noncompetes and Other Post-Employment Restraints on Competition: Empirical Evidence from Trade Secret Litigation, Hastings Law Journal (2021)

An Inside History of the Burger Court's Patent Eligibility Jurisprudence, Akron Law Review (2019) (with Sheena X. Wang)

The DTSA at One:  An Empirical Study of the First Year of Litigation Under the Defend Trade Secrets Act, Wake Forest Law Review (2018) (with David S. Levine)

Toward a Federal Jurisprudence of Trade Secret Law, Berkeley Technology Law Journal (2018) (with Sharon K. Sandeen).

Patent Injunctions on Appeal:  An Empirical Study of the Federal Circuit's Application of eBay, Washington Law Review (2017) (with Ryan T. Holte).

Permanent Injunctions in Patent Litigation After eBay: An Empirical Study (Christopher B. Seaman) Iowa Law Review (2016)

Introduction: The Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2015 (Christopher B. Seaman) Washington and Lee Law Review Online (2015)

The Case Against Federalizing Trade Secrecy (Christopher B. Seaman) Virginia Law Review (2015)

- See Prof. Seaman's full list of publications at his Scholarly Commons page.