Hon. F. Scott Kieff Image

Hon. F. Scott Kieff

Former ITC Commissioner, Professor of Law

George Washington University Law School

The Hon. F. Scott Kieff is the Fred C. Stevenson Research Professor of Law at GW Law School in DC.  He specializes in international trade and business; intellectual property; antitrust; finance and securities regulation; bankruptcy; biotechnology and medicine; governance and compliance; cyber; privacy; and security.

A former Commissioner of the U.S. International Trade Commission from 2013-17 in a Republican seat, he was nominated by President Obama and confirmed unanimously by the Senate during Democrat control.  He has served as an advisor to high-level government offices during the Bush, Obama, and Trump Presidential Administrations on national security and economics

He previously held secondary faculty appointments for several years as a professor in the Washington University School of Medicine’s Department of Neurological Surgery, and the Munich Intellectual Property Law Center at Germany’s Max Planck Institute, as well as a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.  He also has held visiting faculty appointments in the law schools at Northwestern, Chicago, and Stanford, and in the Olin Program on Law and Economics at Harvard.

In the private sector, he works through Kieff Strategies LLC to bring together fellow academics, former government officials, and business practitioners to collaboratively engage complex challenges facing firms in technology, finance, business, and law.  This work includes strategic consulting, conducting investigations and crisis management, and providing expert litigation advice and testimony, as well as neutral services as mediators, arbitrators, and compliance monitors directly for private parties or on appointment by courts and other tribunals.

A former law clerk to US Circuit Judge Giles S. Rich, and graduate of MIT and Penn Law School, he was recognized as one of the Nation’s “Top 50 under 45” by the magazine IP Law & Business in 2008.  He was elected to the European Academy of Sciences and Arts in 2012.

Recent Articles by Hon. F. Scott Kieff

How One ITC Initial Determination Highlights the Links Among a Strong Patent System, Jobs and International Cooperation

An Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) at the International Trade Commission (ITC) recently determined that Samsung Phones violate key patents on magnetic emulator technology for contactless payment systems from Pittsburgh’s Dynamics, Inc. We have been collaborating for years in the academic and public sectors on issues raised in that case, and are consulting consult with Dynamics because we think these issues are vital to our innovation ecosystem, our national economy, and our commitments to international partners. It is especially illustrative of the serious risks facing these vital public interests that far too frequently when there has been a full and fair adjudication determining that there has been infringement of multiple patents and that those patents are neither invalid nor unenforceable, the headline more than suggests that the infringer has been cleared of responsibility.

Thinking about IP and collaboration at the Patent-Antitrust Interface

This different approach—a commercialization approach—has been embraced across the American political spectrum, including both the Carter administration and the Reagan administration,[4] as well as by celebrated jurists of the last century coming from diverse philosophical perspectives, including Circuit Judges Learned Hand, Jerome Frank, and Giles Rich,[5] who saw it as important to helping the economy and society.[6] The roots of a commercialization approach to patents, in particular, reach back even further into American history, including Abraham Lincoln’s view that the patent system “added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius, in the discovery and production of new and useful things.”[7] Its study has also long extended far beyond our nation… A commercialization approach to IP views IP more in the tradition of private law, rather than public law. It does so by placing greater emphasis on viewing IP as property rights, which in turn is accomplished by greater reliance on interactions among private parties over or around those property rights, including via contracts.

Past Events with Hon. F. Scott Kieff

IPWatchdog LIVE 2023

September 17-19, 2023