Amy Semet

Amy Semet is an Associate Professor of Law teaching civil procedure, property, intellectual property law and patent law at the law school, and is affiliated with the University’s department of Political Science. Her research focuses on studying legal institutions in intellectual property law (particularly patent law) and administrative law from an empirical and statistical perspective. In particular, she has created several databases of administrative agency and court decisions in intellectual property law, immigration law, labor law, and environmental law so as to better understand how agencies and courts make decisions. This empirical research then allows her to posit how these institutions can best be reformed. 

Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Georgetown Law Journal, Duke Law Journal, UC Irvine Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, Boston College Law Review, Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law, among others. More information about her research is available at www.amysemet.com.

Semet graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth College, where she studied government and history, before moving on to Harvard Law School, from which she graduated cum laude. She obtained her doctorate in political science from Columbia University. Semet clerked for Judge Paul Michel at the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. She was also an associate for six years at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP in New York City where her practice related to general litigation, intellectual property litigation, and intellectual property corporate transactional law. In particular, her work at Simpson Thatcher focused primarily on patent law. She was heavily involved in a two month long bench trial involving a pharmaceutical patent, which was resolved successfully for the client by the district court and upheld on appeal by the Federal Circuit. Semet also was involved in much pro bono work, including filing and prosecuting trademark applications for public interest organizations, representing clients in divorce and custody proceedings, and assisting families with filing claims before the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund.

Semet has much teaching experience. While a law student at Harvard Law School, she taught legal writing to first-year students as a member of the Board of Student Advisors for two years. She has gone on to teach American politics and statistics at Dartmouth’s Government Department and at Columbia’s Political Science Department and Quantitative Methods in Social Science program. Semet also did a postdoctoral fellowship for three years at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University and was a Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project.