Chris Seaman to Deliver Lecture in Honor of His Appointment to the Robert E.R. Huntley Professorship Seaman’s talk will be held Oct. 8 in the Millhiser Moot Court Room.

By Law Communications
September 30, 2024

Chris Seaman, professor of law at Washington and Lee University, will present a public lecture to mark his appointment to the Robert E.R. Huntley Professorship. Seaman’s lecture, “Democracy, History, and Washington and Lee,” will be held at 4:00 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 8, in the Millhiser Moot Court Room, Sydney Lewis Hall. The talk is free and open to the public.

Seaman joined the Washington and Lee Law faculty in 2012.  His research and teaching interests include intellectual property, property, and election law and voting rights, with a particular focus on intellectual property litigation and remedies for the violation of intellectual property rights. From 2017 until 2023, he served as Director of the Frances Lewis Law Center, the Law School’s center for intellectual life and faculty research support.

The Robert E.R. Huntley Professorship was created by the Board of Trustees to honor former Washington and Lee University President Huntley, who served from 1968 to 1983. Huntley also served as Dean of the Law School from 1967-1968, and before that, he spent ten years as a member of the faculty.

Professor Seaman’s intellectual property-related scholarship has appeared in a variety of law reviews and journals, including the Virginia Law Review, the Iowa Law Review, the Washington Law Review, the Wake Forest Law Review, the BYU Law Review, the Hastings Law Journal, the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, the Yale Journal of Law and Technology, and the Berkeley Technology Law Journal. His most recent article, “Beyond Trade Secrecy: Confidentiality Agreements That Act Like Noncompetes,” was published in the Yale Law Journal.

Seaman’s empirical study of willful patent infringement and enhanced damages was selected as a winner of the Samsung-Stanford Patent Prize competition for outstanding new scholarship related to patent remedies, and his co-authored article on patent injunctions at the Federal Circuit was chosen as a winner of the Federalist Society’s Young Legal Scholars Paper Competition. He received the John W. Elrod Law Alumni Faculty Fellowship for Teaching in both 2014 and 2019 and was named an Ethan Allen Faculty Fellow for scholarship in 2015.

Professor Seaman received his B.A. in 2000 from Swarthmore College and his J.D. in 2004 from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where he was an Executive Editor of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review and a recipient of the Edwin R. Keedy Award.  After a judicial clerkship with the Honorable R. Barclay Surrick of the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, he practiced intellectual property law at Sidley Austin LLP in Chicago from 2005-2009, where he represented clients in patent, copyright, trademark and trade secret litigation in federal and state courts.  Prior to joining Washington and Lee’s faculty, Professor Seaman was a Visiting Assistant Professor at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law and an adjunct professor at Loyola University Chicago School of Law.