Daniel J. Gervais

Daniel J. Gervais holds the Milton R. Underwood Chair in Law at Vanderbilt Law School, where he has directed the Intellectual Property Program since 2008. He is also a Senior Associate Professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for Information Law (IvIR) at the University of Amsterdam — an institution with which he has longstanding ties — and a principal at Gervais AI & IP Inc. His scholarly focus spans international intellectual property law, artificial intelligence and copyright, collective rights management, and the intersection of trade and IP.

He is the author of the leading commentary on the TRIPS Agreement, now in its fifth edition (Sweet & Maxwell, 2021), and has published more than 95 articles and 18 books with Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Sweet & Maxwell, Edward Elgar, and other major publishers. His work has appeared in Science and Nature, as well as in leading law reviews in the United States, Europe, and beyond. His Google Scholar h-index stands at 41, with over 7,145 citations and an i10-index of 107.

Before entering academia, Gervais spent a decade in practice and in international organizations. He served as a Legal Officer at the GATT (now WTO) in Geneva during the Uruguay Round negotiations — present as the TRIPS Agreement itself was being drafted — and subsequently as Head of Section at WIPO, Deputy Secretary General of the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC) in Paris, and Vice President of the Copyright Clearance Center in Massachusetts. He later practised as a partner at BCF, a Canadian law firm specializing in technology law. This background lends his scholarship a distinctive grounding in how international IP rules are made, negotiated, and applied in practice.

His academic career has taken him from the University of Ottawa — where he served as Acting Dean of the Faculty of Law — to Vanderbilt, with visiting and affiliate appointments at the University of Amsterdam, Carleton University (as a Distinguished Fulbright Chair), the National University of Singapore, Sciences Po in Paris, the University of Strasbourg, and the University of Oslo. He was elected to the Academy of Europe in 2012.

His work has been cited by the Supreme Court of the United States, the Supreme Court of Canada, and Advocates General of the Court of Justice of the European Union. He has testified as an expert before the European Parliament, the United States Congress, and the Parliament of Canada, and has worked as an expert for several national governments in investor-state dispute settlement and trade-based litigation.

He is an Associate Reporter on the American Law Institute's Restatement of the Law, Copyright project, a Member of the ALI, and past President of the International Association for the Advancement of Teaching and Research in Intellectual Property (ATRIP). He served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of World Intellectual Property (Wiley/Blackwell, 2008–2017) and as International Editor of the Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice (Oxford University Press, 2005–2008).

Alongside his legal scholarship, he is an active fiction writer. Forever (Anthem Press, 2023), the first volume of the Coexistence Trilogy, explores questions of identity, consciousness, and coexistence between human and artificial intelligence. His literary novel Diagrams is also published.