W&L Law Prof. Christopher Seaman Named Director of the Lewis Law Center

By Peter Jetton
July 19, 2017

Christopher Seaman, Associate Professor of Law at Washington and Lee University School of Law, has been appointed Director of the Frances Lewis Law Center by Dean Brant Hellwig.

The Frances Lewis Law Center is the independently funded faculty research and support arm of W&L Law. As Director, Seaman will oversee the Center’s agenda, which includes funding summer research projects and research assistants for faculty, sponsoring and supporting conferences and symposia organized at the Law School, and hosting visiting scholars for workshop presentations or more extended visits.

“Chris has really made a mark on W&L Law in his first few years on the faculty,” said Hellwig.  He has been highly productive in his research, he is favorite of students in the classroom, and as chair of our clerkship committee, he has helped numerous students obtain competitive judicial clerkships.  In short, Chris does it all.  We are fortunate to have him leading the Frances Lewis Law Center in the years ahead.”

Seaman joined the Washington and Lee law faculty in 2012.  His research and teaching interests include intellectual property, property, and civil procedure, with a particular focus on intellectual property litigation and remedies for the violation of intellectual property rights.

Seaman’s intellectual property-related scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in a variety of law reviews and journals, including the Virginia Law Review, the Iowa Law Review, the Washington Law Review, the BYU Law Review, the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, the Yale Journal of Law and Technology, and the Berkeley Technology Law Review. His 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.

In addition, Seaman has an interest in voting rights and election law, having written several works on the history, constitutionality, and potential future of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

“The Frances Lewis Law Center plays an integral role in supporting the innovative, rigorous scholarship of our outstanding faculty,” said Seaman. “I’m deeply honored to serve as the Law Center’s new Director, and I look forward to working with my colleagues, the administration, and our students to help continue our tradition of excellence and to further enrich the intellectual life of the Law School community.”

Seaman was selected by the Student Bar Association as Faculty Member of the Year for 2013-2014.  He received the John W. Elrod Law Alumni Faculty Fellowship for Teaching in 2014 and was named an Ethan Allen Faculty Fellow for scholarship in 2015.

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, Seaman was a Visiting Assistant Professor at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law and an adjunct professor at Loyola University Chicago School of Law.

Established in 1978 with a generous gift from Frances and Sydney Lewis, the Law Center’s mandate is to support faculty research and scholarship that advances legal reform.

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