Overview
Christopher Buccafusco joined the Duke Law faculty in 2022 after previously teaching in New York City and Chicago.
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 IP rights for industrial design. For the past decade, Buccafusco has 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 and hedonic psychology 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 joining Duke Law, Buccafusco taught at Cardozo Law School and Chicago-Kent College of Law. At Chicago-Kent, he won the Student Bar Association’s professor of the year award in his first year of teaching, and he later won a university-wide award for excellence in teaching.
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.
