Arti K. Rai
Elvin R. Latty Professor of Law

Arti Rai, Elvin R. Latty Professor of Law and co-Director, The Center for Innovation Policy at Duke Law, is an internationally recognized expert in intellectual property (IP) law, innovation policy, administrative law, and health law. Rai has also taught at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania Law Schools.  Rai's research on innovation law and policy in biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, and software has been funded by NIH, the Kauffman Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson Center.  Her numerous publications have appeared in both peer-reviewed journals and law reviews, including Science, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of Legal Studies, Nature Biotechnology, and the Columbia, Duke, University of Pennsylvania, University of Texas, Georgetown, and Northwestern law reviews. She is the editor of Intellectual Property Law and Biotechnology: Critical Concepts (Edward Elgar, 2011) and the co-author of a 2012 Kauffman Foundation monograph on cost-effective health care innovation.  Rai’s current work focuses on theoretical and empirical analyses of patent eligibility doctrine and on patent institutions, including the Patent Trial and Appeals Board created by the America Invents Act of 2011.

From 2009-2010, Rai served as the Administrator of the Office of External Affairs at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). As External Affairs Administrator, Rai led policy analysis of the patent reform legislation that ultimately became the America Invents Act and worked to establish the USPTO’s Office of the Chief Economist. Prior to that time, she had served on President-Elect Obama’s transition team reviewing the USPTO.  Prior to entering academia, Rai clerked for the Honorable Marilyn Hall Patel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California; was a litigation associate at Jenner & Block (doing patent litigation as well as other litigation); and was a litigator at the Federal Programs Branch of the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Division.

Rai regularly testifies before Congress and relevant administrative bodies on innovation-related law and policy issues and regularly advises federal agencies on policy issues raised by the research that they fund. She has served a member of the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research and as a public member of the Administrative Conference of the United States.  Rai has also served on, or as a reviewer for, numerous National Academies of Science committees. In 2013, she was elected to the American Law Institute.  She won the World Technology Network Award for Law in 2011.

Rai graduated from Harvard College, magna cum laude, with a degree in biochemistry and history (history and science), attended Harvard Medical School for the 1987-1988 academic year, and received her J.D., cum laude, from Harvard Law School in 1991.

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