World Intellectual Property Day: Spotlight on Professor of Law Aurora Plomer

Press release issued: 26 April 2018

26 April is World Intellectual Property Day, an occasion to increase understanding of and celebrate the role that IP rights play in furthering technology and the arts. This year's WIP Day theme is ‘Powering change: Women in innovation and creativity’, an occasion to highlight the Law School’s research on IP by featuring one of our inspiring Women in Law.

World Intellectual Property Day seeks to showcase the importance of IP, which includes patents, trademarks, industrial designs and copyright. This year's theme focuses on the advancements made by women in the sciences and arts, and the role of IP in encouraging further creative and technological change-making.

Professor Aurora Plomer's research looks at the balance of protection between intellectual property rights and human rights, with a focus on the European patent system, ethics and the regulation of new biotechnologies.

She was the P.I. of a major project on moral exclusions on embryonic stem cell patents in the European Union. The project led to numerous publications and a report published by the Commission highlighting the tensions between the EU moral exclusions on patents and regulatory controls on research. The report called for the EU policy on patents to be developed consistently with the protection of human rights under the European Convention on Human Rights.

In 2014, she was a senior Fernand Braudel fellow at the European University Institute in Florence where she researched the history of patent harmonization in Europe leading to the creation of the Unified Patent Court.

Her latest book, Patents, Human Rights and Access to Science (Edward Elgar, 2015), examines the historical and theoretical foundations of the right to access the benefits of science in international law, and explores the implications for current debates on gene patents and patents in the life-sciences.

The book has been endorsed by leading international scholars as an important contribution to the field, including Christophe Geiger (University of Strasbourg):

"This remarkable book highlights and analyzes the inherent tensions and complementarities of patents with access to science, as materialized in the most prominent international human rights agreements. A must-read for anyone interested in one of the most crucial and debated questions of intellectual property, examined here from the perspective of its fascinating but complex interactions with human rights."

In September 2017 Aurora was invited by UNESCO and the Mexican state of Guanajuato to participate in a high-level meeting on Innovation for Sustainable Development. The presentation, which was based on Aurora's critically acclaimed book, was titled "IP and Human Rights for Sustainable Development" and will be published as a commissioned paper by UNESCO later this year.

To watch an IP and Ethics panel discussion with Aurora, held at UCL ('The impact of ethical considerations on the existence or enforcement of IP Rights'), please click here.

Further information

Aurora Plomer is Professor of Intellectual Property and Human Rights at the University of Bristol Law School. She joined the University of Bristol Law School in August 2016 from the University of Sheffield, where she was Director of the Sheffield Institute of Biotechnology, Law and Ethics. Aurora is a member of the European Commission’s panel of ethics experts on new technologies, health and innovation in the FP7 and Horizon 2020 programs. Her research has been funded by UNESCO, the Council of Europe, the European Commission, the Brocher Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, the British Academy and the ESRC.

Find out more about the Law School's Commercial Law Research

The Law School has a number of specialists in different branches of this area of Commercial Law scholarship, which include Law of International Trade, Banking and Financial Law, Enterprise Law, Intellectual Property and Information Technology Law, and Competition Law.