Emily Hudson

I returned to the University of Oxford in September 2023, having previously held posts at the University of Queensland (2009-2012), University of Oxford (2012-2015) and King’s College London (2015-2023). I completed undergraduate degrees in law and science at the University of Melbourne, including spending an Honours year in the Department of Genetics. After graduating, I was a solicitor at Minter Ellison before returning to the Melbourne Law School as a research fellow and, subsequently, doctoral candidate. My thesis won the Law School’s Harold Luntz Graduate Research Thesis Prize (2012) and the university-wide Chancellor’s Prize for Excellence in the PhD Thesis (2013)

My research spans many areas, including intellectual property, personal property, trusts, and law as it relates to cultural institutions and the creative industries. I have a particular interest in interrogating the ‘law in action’: that is, law as understood by everyday actors. This reflects the idea that law has multiple audiences, only some of which are legal experts (judges, lawyers and the like). How do 'regular folk' understand and engage with the law? In exploring these questions, I have used empirical research techniques and have drawn from more recent iterations of law and economics, being scholarship informed by psychologists, behavioural economists and others who have challenged and built on the insights of the Chicago school and its legal offshoots.

My longstanding work with the cultural institution sector is showcased in my monograph, Drafting Copyright Exceptions: From the Law in Books to the Law in Action, published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. I have also published extensively in relation to copyright exceptions, including the pastiche exception (especially in my Intellectual Property Quarterly article from 2017) and exceptions for research and education.

In the 2024-25 academic year, I will be leading the copyright aspects of the FHS option, Copyright, Trade Marks & Allied Rights. I will also be convening the BCL/MJur half option, Incentivising Aesthetic Progress: IP, Art and Design, and contributing to the other IP half-options. 

I have long been a supporter of mooting as part of legal education, and am Director of the Oxford International Intellectual Property Moot.