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Dr Jennifer Davis is a member of the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law, University of Cambridge and an Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. She is the author of Intellectual Property Law, 4th edition (Oxford: OUP, 2012) and with Tanya Aplin, Intellectual Property: Text, Cases and Materials (Oxford: OUP, 3rd edition, forthcoming 2017). Before joining the Faculty of Law, Jennifer practised as a lawyer in the area of intellectual property litigation.

Jennifer has a particular interest in trade mark law, passing off and unfair competition.  She has published widely on these topics.  Jennifer is currently looking the law of unfair competition from a comparative perspective, comparing the approaches of the UK, France Germany and the US.  Jennifer has also had a continuing interest in the role of the public interest in trade mark law, the subject of a number of articles, and she is currently pursuing this theme by looking at the interaction between the average consumer and the public interest.

Jennifer trained as a historian as well as a lawyer and frequently pursues an interdisciplinary approach in relation to intellectual property and its protection.  She has organised a number of interdisciplinary workshops, on trade marks, patents, copyright and the production of intellectual property. Together with Lionel Bently and Jane Ginsburg, she edited Trade Marks and Brands: An Interdisciplinary Critique (Cambridge: CUP, 2008) and Copyright and Piracy: An Interdisciplinary Critique (Cambridge, CUP, 2010).

Jennifer’s own work has looked at the roots of the average consumer from an historical perspective and also from the perspective of behavioural economics.  She has considered the role of the public domain, again from an historical perspective.  And she has published on both.  She also has an ongoing collaboration with the linguist, Professor Alan Durant and together they have written articles on the meaning and protection of trade marks.

Presently, Jennifer is researching and writing a book on the history of trade marks and trade descriptions in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain.  The book will place the development of trade marks and trade descriptions, both their changing meanings and the legal protection offered to them, in the changing social, political and economic context of the period.