Show Notes: Why Your Face Should Be a Trade Secret

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Though much divides us these days, there are still some things we all share in common. One of them is law. In “Common Law,” a podcast sponsored by the University of Virginia School of Law, Dean Risa Goluboff and UVA Law professors Danielle K. Citron, John C. Harrison, Cathy Hwang and Gregory Mitchell explore how law shapes society, how we shape law and why we should all care. MORE

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Risa Goluboff, Danielle Citron and Elizabeth Rowe
S5 E8: Why Your Face Should Be a Trade Secret

Facial recognition technology is used for everything from unlocking your phone to locking up criminals. UVA Law professor Elizabeth Rowe makes the case that biometric data like your face and fingerprints should have trade secret-level protections.

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Show Notes: Why Your Face Should Be a Trade Secret

Elizabeth A. Rowe

Elizabeth Rowe is an internationally renowned expert on trade secret law, intellectual property, trademark and patent law, and corporate espionage. She joined the UVA Law faculty in 2022 as the Henry L. and Grace Doherty Charitable Foundation Professor of Law and the Horace W. Goldsmith Research Professor of Law, after serving as the Irving Cyphen Professor of Law and a Distinguished Teaching Scholar at the University of Florida Levin College of Law, where she was director of the program in intellectual property law.

She is the co-author of the first and leading U.S. casebook on trade secrets, in addition to a “Nutshell” treatise on trade secrets. Much of her research addresses the intersection of trade secrets with employment law and/or technology, as well as the interplay between intellectual property, government policy and innovation. Four of Rowe’s articles have been named by Thomson Reuters Intellectual Property Review as among the best intellectual property articles of the year: “Revisiting Trade Secret Extraterritoriality” (2019), “Unpacking Trade Secret Damages” (2017), “Trade Secrets, Trade, and Extraterritoriality” (2014) and “Trade Secret Litigation and Free Speech: Is it Time to Restrain the Plaintiffs?” (2009). Her most recent co-authored book addresses trade secrecy in international transactions.

Rowe is a member of the American Law Institute and a member of the Leadership Council for The Sedona Conference, which conducts in-depth study in the areas of antitrust, complex litigation and intellectual property rights to provide nonpartisan consensus-based guidance to courts and attorneys. She also is a fellow of the American Bar Foundation. Rowe is a frequent invited speaker at national conferences on intellectual property and also serves as an expert consultant in litigation. She is a former partner at the law firm of Hale and Dorr in Boston (now WilmerHale), where she practiced complex commercial litigation, including intellectual property and employment litigation. While in practice, she was selected as one of the top five up-and-coming attorneys in Massachusetts.

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