Profile

Lea Bishop

Professor of Law and Dean's Fellow

Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law
Lawrence W. Inlow Hall, Room 315
530 W. New York Street
Indianapolis, IN 46202-3225

Phone: (317) 278-4475
E-Mail: lbshaver@iu.edu

SSRN

Education

B.A., M.A., 2002, University of Chicago
J.D., 2006, Yale Law School

Courses

Intellectual Property, Copyright, and Patent Law

Bio

Professor Bishop holds a J.D. From Yale Law School and an M.A. from the University of Chicago.

She was a clerk to Hon. David F. Hamilton and a Fulbright Scholar in South Africa, and taught as a postdoctoral fellow at Yale Law School before joining the IU McKinney School of Law faculty in 2012.

Lea Bishop’s scholarship applies a social justice and human rights perspective to the study of copyright law.

By acknowledging that copyright’s incentive system creates both winners and losers, she argues, copyright scholars can help identify ways to adapt copyright law and policy to better serve all of society, particularly disadvantaged and marginalized populations.

A frequent hallmark of Professor Bishop’s scholarship is the use of social scientific case studies, uniting empirical and normative perspectives to understand the law's real-world impact while building a vision of more just and inclusive alternatives.

As an internationally recognized expert on the intersection of intellectual property and human rights law, Professor Bishop's scholarship has been foundational to the concept of “the right to science and culture” now officially adopted by the United Nations.

Her 2020 book, from Yale University Press, highlights real-world solutions to make early reading material more accessible to children of all incomes, languages, and cultural backgrounds: ENDING BOOK HUNGER: Access to Print Across Barriers of Class and Culture.

ENDING BOOK HUNGER and earlier scholarship were originally published as Lea Shaver.