Jessica Litman

Jessica Litman is an American lawyer specializing in intellectual property law.

Early life and education Litman is from Pittsburgh. After law school, she served as a law clerk to Judge Betty Fletcher on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. She has also taught at New York University and the University of Tokyo. According to Brian Leiter, as of 2007 she was one of the most-cited U.S. law professors in the field of intellectual property/cyberlaw.

Litman has testified before Congress multiple times. According to digital libraries expert Karen Coyle, Litman’s 1994 testimony before the Working Group on Intellectual Property of the White House Information Infrastructure Task Force “leapt from the page like some minor miracle of truth and justice.”

Litman is a 2006 recipient of Public Knowledge’s IP3 award, awarded each year for significant contribution the intellectual property field. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute and an adviser to that body’s Restatement of the Law, Copyright. She has served as a trustee of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A., as a member of the advisory councils of both Public Knowledge and the Future of Music Coalition, and as chair of the Association of American Law Schools Section on Intellectual Property. and the organizing committee of the 25th Telecommunications Policy Research Conference. She was a member of the National Research Council's Committee on Partnerships in Weather and Climate Services.

In 2021, Litman gave keynote speeches at conferences at Stanford and Cardozo law schools.

Publications Litman is the author of Digital Copyright: Protecting Intellectual Property on the Internet (2001), which explores the events leading to the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The book's third edition was published in open-access form in 2017.

Personal life Litman's brother, Harry Litman, is a lawyer, law professor, and political commentator.