Justine Pila

St Catherine's webpage here.

Professor Pila came to Oxford in 2004 to take up her posts in the Law Faculty and St Catherine's College. She is also a Research Fellow at the Institute of European and Comparative Law.

Justine's research interests cover the fields of intellectual property, regulation, and law and technology. She is the author of two research monographs – The Requirement for an Invention in Patent Law (OUP 2010) and The Subject Matter of Intellectual Property (OUP) – and of two text books – European Intellectual Property Law (1st edn OUP 2016 and 2nd edn OUP 2019, with PLC Torremans) and Seville's Intellectual Property Law and Policy (3rd end EE 2022). She is also the editor of several published collections, including The Oxford Handbook of Intellectual Property Law (OUP 2018, with RC Dreyfuss). 

Her most recent works concern the UK IP system post-Brexit (forthcoming in P Craig and V Velyvyte (eds), The UK Regulatory Framework post-Brexit: Law Unbound (OUP 2026)), and the concept on Inventorship (forthcoming in P Torremans et al (eds), Elgar Encyclopaedia of Intellectual Property (EE 2026)). She is currently completing an article on the justificatory basis of authors' moral rights (for a special issue of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism), and is also working on a monograph on Law, Regulation, and Technology for OUP.

Justine's teaching at Oxford covers her areas of research. At graduate level she convenes and teaches the Faculty's Law, Regulation and Technology mini-option for the FHS Jurisprudence course, the FHS and BCL/MJur Law and Technology courses, the Law, Regulation, and Technology seminars for the BCL/MJur Regulation course, and the BCL/MJur Comparative Copyright course. She also teaches IP, and Law and Technology, on other courses for the Faculty. She has supervised many DPhil students in a range of areas over the course of her career.

In an earlier life Justine took undergraduate degrees in Law and Arts at the University of Melbourne, worked as an IP solicitor and Associate to the Chief Justice of the Australian Federal Court, and completed a PhD in Law, with a thesis on the requirement for an invention in patent law, also at the University of Melbourne. She has recently finished a stint as "Professor 2" at the University of Bergen in Norway.