Jacques de Werra

Professor Jacques de Werra teaches contract law and intellectual property law at the Law School of the University of Geneva, Switzerland. He authored a doctoral thesis in Swiss and comparative copyright law which he completed as a visiting scholar at the Max-Planck Institute for Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law in Munich (in 1996). He then practised law in Switzerland, before obtaining an LL.M. degree from Columbia Law School in New York City (2001) and being admitted to the New York bar (2002). Upon completion of the LL.M. program, he conducted a research project on the development of global copyright licensing policies in the information age as a visiting scholar at Columbia Law School which was sponsored by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
He joined the Law School of the University of Geneva in 2006 after having practiced intellectual property law and corporate law in law firms in Switzerland (Geneva and Zurich) and in New York. He is a panelist for domain name disputes of the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center and of the Asian Domain Name Dispute Resolution Center (in Hong Kong) and is the vice-director of the Geneva Art Law Center. Prof. de Werra is a frequent speaker at conferences organized in Switzerland and abroad (including in China, India, Japan, Singapore and the USA) on topics related to various aspects of intellectual property law, of contract law (particularly on the commercial exploitation of intellectual property assets by way of transfer of technology, licensing and franchising) and information technology and Internet law. He has also published extensively in these fields.