Julie E. Cohen
Julie E. Cohen is an American legal scholar and a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, where she has taught since 1999. She writes about copyright, intellectual property, and privacy, and serves on the advisory boards of the Electronic Privacy Information Center and Public Knowledge.
She has written and co-authored influential books, including Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code, and the Play of Everyday Practice, and the casebook Copyright in a Global Information Economy.
Education and early career: Cohen earned an AB from Harvard University and a JD from Harvard Law School. She clerked for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. From 1992 to 1995, she practiced intellectual property litigation at the San Francisco firm McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen. In 1995, she joined the University of Pittsburgh School of Law as an assistant professor of law.
Academic work: In the field of intellectual property, Cohen has been a key voice in debates about using technology and mass-market contracts to protect IP, warning that such measures can threaten individual privacy and autonomy.
Subjectivity and the self: Cohen uses philosophy to examine legal theory, arguing that assumptions about the self influence information policy. She introduces postmodernist ideas into discussions of information policy and legal theory.
This page was last edited on 29 January 2026, at 12:10 (CET).