In August, Prof. Laura Dolbow will join the Colorado Law Faculty as Associate Professor. Prof. Dolbow researches the intersection of patent law, health law, and administrative law.
Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Michigan Law Review, the Vanderbilt Law Review and the Administrative Law Review. Her law school note won a 2018 Burton Award for Distinguished Legal Writing and was cited by the Patent Office in a final rule regarding claim construction standards in post-grant review proceedings. Her article, Agency Adherence to Legislative History, won the 2017 Gellhorn-Sargentich Law Student Essay Competition and the Weldon B. White Prize. 
Dolbow is a Sharswood Fellow at Penn Carey Law. Before that, she practiced in the appellate and patent litigation groups at Covington & Burling LLP in Washington, DC. She clerked for Judge Judith Rogers on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and for Judge Timothy Dyk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. She received her J.D. and B.A. from Vanderbilt University, where she won the Founder’s Medal for her law school class and served as Senior Articles Editor of the Vanderbilt Law Review. Before law school, she taught middle school math through Teach for America in Nashville, TN.
In this interview, Laura shares more about her work, the inspiration behind it, and some of her career accomplishments so far.
What are you most excited about in your move to Colorado?
LD: I am very excited about teaching law students and joining the academic community at Colorado Law! I’m also looking forward to exploring trails on hikes and runs. Suggestions for trails or other outdoor activities are welcome!
What is your proudest career accomplishment?
LD: My proudest career accomplishment was during my second year as a middle school math teacher through Teach for America. I taught Algebra 1 to eighth graders, and my proudest moment was when my entire class passed the standardized exam to receive high school credit. The students worked so hard to pass the high school exam. Many of them made massive amounts of progress in their math skills during the year. I was so thrilled to see their hard work pay off in their exam results!
Can you tell me about your time as a Sharswood fellow? How has that impacted your career path?
LD: The Sharswood Fellowship helped give me time to write and develop my research agenda before I went on the job market for tenure-track teaching positions. As a Sharswood fellow, I have had the opportunity to teach law students, attend faculty workshops, and work on my own research. I taught a seminar about regulations that affect drug prices, which has given me ideas for future papers and helped develop my expertise about regulation of the pharmaceutical industry. Now, I am co-teaching Intro to Intellectual Property, which has been very helpful experience for teaching larger classes in the future. Spending time in faculty workshops and on research has also been helpful for thinking through how to frame research papers and select topics for future articles.
What inspired your interests in patent law, health law, and administrative law?
LD: I got interested in patent law and health law when I majored in chemistry in undergrad. I was really interested in the research my chemistry professors were doing, particularly about drug development. I worked on the school newspaper at the time and interviewed several of them about their research. Given my interest in both science and writing, they suggested that I think about patent law as a career. Then in law school, I loved my classes about administrative law and became more interested in regulation of the pharmaceutical industry generally. As a lawyer at Covington & Burling, I was able to work on cases that involved all three topics. My practice experience further solidified my interest in researching and teaching in these areas.
Can you share a little about any current projects you are working on?
LD: I am currently working on a paper about laws that expressly authorize agencies to control how patents are used in commerce. These laws have come up in debates about high drug prices, particularly when federal funding supported development of drugs. This paper, which is forthcoming in the Michigan Law Review, surveys all the laws that explicitly give agencies powers over patents and studies how they have been used in practice. The Biden Administration recently issued guidance about how one power over federally funded inventions could be used. I argue in the paper that it should go further and issue guidance about how all the different powers could be used, which could have policy implications in a range of areas. I have a couple other ideas to build on this paper in future work, which I plan to work on next semester at Colorado!