About the Author
Jennifer E. Rothman is the Nicholas F. Gallicchio Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania. She is globally recognized for her scholarship in the field of intellectual property, privacy, and entertainment & media law, and is the leading expert on right of publicity and personality rights.
Rothman’s scholarship focuses on conflicts between intellectual property rights and other constitutionally protected rights, particularly the freedom of speech. Much of Rothman’s recent work focuses on the ways intellectual property laws are employed to turn people into a form of property. Her book, The Right of Publicity: Privacy Reimagined for a Public World, published by Harvard University Press, has been described as the “definitive biography of the right of publicity.” Rothman is also the author of numerous essays and articles that regularly appear in top law reviews and journals, including most recently “Postmortem Privacy”, published in the Michigan Law Review, and “Navigating the Identity Thicket: Trademark’s Lost Theory of Personality, the Right of Publicity, and Preemption”, published in the Harvard Law Review. Her Donald C. Brace Lecture, “Copyrighting People”, is forthcoming in the Journal of the Copyright Society.
Rothman has testified in Congress multiples times, most recently to address issues involving intellectual property, personality rights, and artificial intelligence. Rothman is also the creator of Rothman’s Roadmap to the Right of Publicity, an online resource, located at www.rightofpublicityroadmap.com, that provides expert analysis of right of publicity and related laws, as well as commentary on recent cases and legislation.
Professor Rothman is the Reporter for the Uniform Law Commission Study of the Protection of Name, Image, and Likeness Rights, an elected member of the American Law Institute, and an adviser on the Restatement of the Law (Third) of Torts: Defamation and Privacy.
Rothman received her AB from Princeton University where she received the Asher Hinds Book Prize and the Grace May Tilton Prize. Rothman received an MFA in film production from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, where she directed an award-winning documentary. Rothman received her JD from UCLA, where she graduated first in her class and won the Jerry Pacht Memorial Constitutional Law Award for her scholarship in that field. Rothman served as law clerk to the Honorable Marsha S. Berzon of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco. Rothman joined the Penn faculty in 2021, after serving as a member of the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis and as the William G. Coskran Chair at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. Rothman has also worked in the film industry, including a position in feature production at Paramount Pictures, and as an entertainment and intellectual property litigator in Los Angeles. Rothman holds an appointment at the Annenberg School for Communication.