Rebecca Tushnet

Rebecca Tushnet (born April 4, 1973) is the inaugural Frank Stanton Professor of First Amendment Law at Harvard Law School and an American copyright, trademark, First Amendment, and false advertising legal scholar. In addition to her general scholarship, Tushnet is known for her fanfiction-related scholarship and her legal advocacy work for the Organization for Transformative Works, a nonprofit fandom-related project that supports fanworks (such as fanfiction) through preservation and advocacy. Tushnet received an A.B. from Harvard University in 1995, and earned her J.D. from Yale Law School in 1998. Tushnet clerked for Third Circuit judge Edward R. Becker (1998–99) and US Supreme Court Justice David Souter (1999-2000). She practiced at Debevoise & Plimpton. Tushnet then entered teaching, first at NYU School of Law (2002–04), then at Georgetown University Law Center (2004–16), and most recently at Harvard Law School. In practice, Tushnet has represented fans in copyright and trademark disputes with rightsholders. Her father is Mark Tushnet and her mother is Elizabeth Alexander, who directs the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. Her sister Eve Tushnet is a lesbian Catholic author and blogger.

Selected scholarship and casebooks

Articles

• "Worth a Thousand Words: The Images of Copyright Law", 125 Harv. L. Rev. 683 (2012)
• "Gone in 60 Milliseconds: Trademark Law and Cognitive Science", 86 Texas L. Rev. 507 (2008)
• "Legal Fictions: Copyright, Fan Fiction, and a New Common Law", 17 Loy. L.A. Ent. L.J. 651 (1997)
• "Copy This Essay: How Fair Use Doctrine Harms Free Speech and How Copying Serves It", 114 Yale L.J. 535 (2004)
• "Copyright as a Model for Free Speech Law: What Copyright Has in Common with Anti-Pornography Laws, Campaign Finance Reform, and Telecommunications Regulation" 42 B.C. L. Rev. 1 (2000)

Casebooks

• Advertising & Marketing Law: Cases & Materials (2014 ed.), with Eric Goldman (the first casebook on this topic)

• Advertising & Marketing Law: Cases & Materials, self-published, July 2012 .

Awards

• 1997 Nathan Burkan Prize for best paper in the field of copyright ("Legal Fictions")
• The Copyright Society of the USA awarded her the 2014 Seton Award for Performance Anxiety: Copyright Embodied and Disembodied, 60 J. Copyright Soc’y U.S.A. 209 (2013)
• 2015 recipient of Public Knowledge’s IP3 Award in the area of intellectual property
• In 2016, her blog was inducted into the ABA Journal's "Blawg 100 Hall of Fame."

• http://www.csusa.org/news/177866/Rebecca-Tushnet-Named-2014-Seton-Award-Winner.htm
• http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/2013_blawg_100_hall_of_fame