Christopher J Buccafusco
Edward and Ellen Marie Schwarzman Professor of Law

Christopher Buccafusco joined the Duke Law faculty in 2022 from Yeshiva University’s Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, where he was associate dean for faculty development, director of the Intellectual Property & Information Law Program, and a professor.

Buccafusco's research covers a wide range of topics and methods related to creativity, innovation, and intellectual property law. He uses novel social science experiments to explore the nature of innovation markets, and he writes about evolving issues in copyright, patent, and trademark law, including music copyright litigation, pharmaceutical patents, and protection for industrial design. At Cardozo Law he co-hosted an annual workshop on empirical methods in intellectual property law with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office and Northwestern University Law School.

Buccafusco is also a co-author of Happiness and the Law (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and a series of articles that apply recent social science research on well-being to legal issues, including criminal, administrative, tort, and intellectual property laws. He has been widely quoted in media, including in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Rolling Stone. His article on the economics of airplane seat reclining for Slate has been covered by dozens of media outlets around the world.

Prior to his tenure at Cardozo, Buccafusco taught at Chicago-Kent College of Law at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He won the Student Bar Association’s professor of the year award in his first year on the faculty, and he later won a university-wide award for excellence in teaching. At Chicago-Kent, he co-founded the Center for Empirical Studies of Intellectual Property.

Buccafusco is a graduate of Georgia Tech and the University of Georgia School of Law and earned a master’s degree in the history of culture from the University of Chicago.

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