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Sepehr Shahshahani

Professor of Law

Professor Shahshahani will join the WashU Law faculty in fall of 2025.

Sepehr Shahshahani is a Professor at the School of Law, where he teaches courses on intellectual property and civil procedure. His research focuses on technology and innovation policy, intellectual property, antitrust, and courts. It explores the role of procedure, legal institutions, and courts in shaping economic and political outcomes, especially in promoting competition and innovation. Sepehr pursues these research interests using a mix of methods, often integrating mathematical and statistical techniques with legal analysis. Trained as both a lawyer and a political scientist, he seeks to be faithful to the values of both disciplines by being rigorous about social scientific methodology and sensitive to legal nuance. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in leading law reviews and peer-reviewed journals, including the Cornell Law Review, the NYU Law Review, the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, the Journal of Law & Economics, the Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization, and the Journal of Legal Studies.

Sepehr joins WashU from Fordham Law School. He began his teaching career in 2019 after obtaining his PhD from the Department of Politics at Princeton University, where he received a Charlotte Elizabeth Procter Honorific Fellowship for “the highest scholarly excellence in graduate work.” Prior to his academic career, he was a litigator at a large law firm in New York City and clerked for the Honorable William E. Smith of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island and the Honorable Ronald Lee Gilman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit Court. Sepehr was born and raised in Iran.

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  • Education
    • Ph.D. in Politics, Princeton University, 2019, (M.A. in Politics, 2016)
    • LLM, New York University School of Law, 2014
    • J.D. magna cum laude, Boston University School of Law, 2008
    • B.A. in Political Science, with honors, University of Chicago, 2004
  • Areas of Expertise
    • Civil Procedure
    • Intellectual Property (Copyright, Patents, Trademark)
    • Judicial Behavior
    • Law and Economics
    • Law and Politics
  • Publications

    SSRN Authors Page

    • When Hard Cases Make Bad Law: A Theory of How Case Facts Affect Judge-Made Law, 110 CORNELL LAW REVIEW (forthcoming 2025)
      • Selected for presentation at the Harvard/Yale/Stanford Junior Faculty Forum 2022
    • Against the Abstract-Ideas Exclusion, 40 BERKELEY TECHNOLOGY LAW JOURNAL (forthcoming 2025)
    • The Missing Element in Trademark Infringement (with Maggie Wittlin), 110 IOWA LAW REVIEW 1247 (2025)
    • Testing Political Antitrust (with Nolan McCarty), 98 N.Y.U. LAW REVIEW 1169 (2023)
      • Nominated, Antitrust Writing Awards, best academic article in General Antitrust, 2024
      • Featured on Marginal Revolution (Apr. 22, 2023)
    • Measuring Follow-On Innovation (with Janet Freilich), 52 RESEARCH POLICY 104854 (2023)
      • Reviewed by Laura Pedraza-Fariña, How Do Patents Influence Cumulative Innovation?, JOTWELL (Jan. 24, 2023)
    • Hard Cases Make Bad Law? A Theoretical Investigation, 51 JOURNAL OF LEGAL STUDIES 133 (2022)
    • Coordination and Innovation in Judiciaries: Correct Law vs. Consistent Law (with Charles Cameron and Mehdi Shadmehr), 17 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE 61 (2022)
    • The Fact-Law Distinction: Strategic Factfinding and Lawmaking in a Judicial Hierarchy, 37 JOURNAL OF LAW, ECONOMICS, & ORGANIZATION 440 (2021)
      • Honorable Mention, Best Graduate Student Paper Award, American Political Science Association, Law and Courts Section, 2020
    • The Role of Courts in Technology Policy, 61 JOURNAL OF LAW & ECONOMICS 37 (2018)
    • Religion and Judging on the Federal Courts of Appeals (with Lawrence Liu), 14 JOURNAL OF EMPIRICAL LEGAL STUDIES 716 (2017)
    • The Nirvana Fallacy in Fair Use Reform, 16 MINNESOTA JOURNAL OF LAW, SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY 273 (2015)
    • The Design of Useful Article Exclusion: A Way Out of the Mess, 57 JOURNAL OF THE COPYRIGHT SOCIETY OF THE U.S.A. 859 (2010)
      • First Prize, Nathan Burkan Memorial Competition for papers on copyright law, Boston University, 2008
    • Note, Politics Under the Cover of Law: Can International Law Help Resolve the Iran Nuclear Crisis?, 25 BOSTON UNIVERSITY INTERNATIONAL LAW JOURNAL 369 (2007)

    WORKING PAPERS

    • Judges, Lawyers, and Legal Innovation (with Deborah Beim)
    • Fact-Law Confusion
  • Download CV