Estelle Derclaye

Estelle Derclaye holds degrees in law from the University of Liège (Licence en droit; Diplome d'Etudes Specialisées en droit), The George Washington University (LLM) and London (PhD). She was awarded a Fulbright grant as well as Rotary and Baker & McKenzie scholarships to study for her LLM in the USA. She joined the University of Nottingham as a lecturer in 2006, became Associate Professor and Reader in Intellectual Property Law in 2009 and Professor of Intellectual Property Law in 2012. Before joining Nottingham, she practiced intellectual property in an international law firm in Brussels and prior to that, she was a lecturer at the Universities of Leicester and London (Queen Mary). Thanks to several Max-Planck Institute bursaries, she spent time at the Max-Planck Institute for Intellectual Property and Competition Law (Munich) in 2002 and 2004 to work on her PhD.

Professor Derclaye's main interest is intellectual property law, in particular copyright and designs law, IP overlaps and empirical legal research in intellectual property law. She is the president (May 2021- May 2022) of the European Copyright Society, a group of European academics aiming to influence policy-making and has been a member of the society's since 2014. From 2008 to 2010, she was a member of the Copyright Expert Panel of the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property Policy, which advised the UK Intellectual Property Office. In 2014, she was appointed as a member of the unregistered rights expert advisory group advising the UK Intellectual Property Office which is now the UKIPO's research expert advisory group. She is also a member of the University of Nottingham's Commercial Law Centre.

Professor Derclaye was a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley (2010) and at the University of Melbourne (2013) and a visiting professor at the National University of Singapore (2015). In 2012, as part of the RCUK Centre for Copyright and New Business Models in the Creative Economy (CREATe), she was awarded funding to hire researchers to carry out research on copyright and open academic publishing and hold a stakeholders' workshop.

She has done expert work for national and foreign law firms, the UK Intellectual Property Office, the European Commission (in 2017, she co-wrote a study supporting the evaluation of the Database Directive for DG CNECT), the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission and international organisations and welcomes requests for expert work from both the public and private sector. She also welcomes proposals for postgraduate research in all fields of intellectual property law and has supervised several PhD students to completion (see research students tab).