Steven Wilf

Steven Wilf

Steven R. Wilf is a Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut School of Law. He is an expert on intellectual property law, historical jurisprudence, and legal history.

Professor Wilf was born in Philadelphia, and earned his J.D. from Yale Law School and his Ph.D. from the Yale Department of History in 1995. He also received a B.S. from Arizona State University. He has been a visiting professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and DADD guest professor at the Free University of Berlin. He also has held fellowships as John Carter Brown Fellow at Brown University, Fellow in Comparative Legal History at the University of Chicago, Golieb Fellow at the New York University School of Law, and at The Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem. In 2010-2011, he was a Microsoft/LAPA Fellow in Law, Property, and the Economic Organization of Society at the Princeton Program in Law and Public Affairs. In 2011-2012, he was a Lemelson Fellow at the Smithsonian Institute. Prior to coming to Connecticut, where he was one of the founders of the Intellectual Property Program, Professor Wilf was a law clerk for the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and taught at Chicago-Kent College of Law.

In Intellectual Property law, where he has written on trade secret, trademark, copyright, and patent laws, his work has focus ed largely on the role of culture in shaping doctrinal legal rules. More recently, he has written on the history of Intellectual Property law. As in other areas of his legal historical work, he has identified the contingent elements of historical development, and seeks to unpack alternative normative outcomes.

Professor Wilf's earlier scholarship examined the late eighteenth-century emergence of a rich vernacular legal language in the area of criminal law, which was intimately connected to American patriot agitation against the British in the course of the American Revolution. He has argued that America's later legal development should be rooted in this formative period rather than in court-based interpretation of the United States Constitution. He addressed the question of how to understand law before a law giving moment in his book, The Law Before the Law.

From his eighteenth-century American scholarship, his study of how pre-Sinai Jewish law was interpreted across two millennia of thinking about the law before the Torah, and his essays on nineteenth-century historical jurisprudence, he is best known for advocating a legal history of the imagination, arguing that legal historians should look at how law was envisioned in all its possibilities, even fanciful constructions of normative principles, rather than simply limit themselves to positive law created by legislatures or courts.