Trademark and Free Speech at the Crossroads

Christine Haight Farley is a Professor of Law at American University Washington College of Law. She specializes in information law and teaches courses on contract law, intellectual property, advertising law, and art law. Her current research focuses on branding in the age of data-driven advertising and the over protection of design. She serves as Co-Faculty Director of the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property and previously served as Associate Dean for Faculty and Academic Affairs. Farley has received the Excellence in Teaching Award and the Edwin A. Mooers Scholarship Award. She has been a visiting professor at the University of Paris West, the University of Puerto Rico, the University of Havana, Monash University, and the National Law University in Lucknow, India, and has given lectures on intellectual property in more than twenty-five countries. She serves on the Board of Directors for the Center for Inter-American Legal Education, and has served on the Executive Committees of the Intellectual Property and the Art Law Sections of the American Association of Law Schools and as a member of a presidential task force of the International Trademark Association. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Senior Specialist grant to teach U.S. intellectual property law to foreign law students. Before teaching, she was an associate specialized in trademark and copyright litigation with Rabinowitz, Boudin, Standard, Krinsky & Lieberman in New York. She holds a B.A. (Binghamton), J.D. (Buffalo), LL.M. (Columbia), and a J.S.D. (Columbia).

Ramsey received the USD School of Law’s Thorsnes Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship in 2020-2021 and the Class of 1975 Endowed Professorship in 2017-2018 for her excellence in teaching and scholarship. Ramsey’s article, “Descriptive Trademarks and the First Amendment” in 70 Tennessee Law Review 1095 (2003), was judged by the editor of the Intellectual Property Law Review (Tripp, ed.) (West, 2004) to be one of the best intellectual property law review articles of 2003. She is a member of the Order of the Coif, the American Intellectual Property Law Association, the International Association for the Advancement of Teaching and Research in Intellectual Property, and the International Trademark Association.