Professor Marketa Trimble Joins the Boyd School of Law Faculty

The Boyd School of Law is fortunate to be the home of not only nationally but also internationally recognized scholars in the fields of international law and intellectual property law. This year the Boyd community welcomed a new addition to this group of renowned scholars and respected educators – Professor Marketa Trimble. Her research concerning cross-border aspects of intellectual property law combines her interest in both fields and provides insights that are extremely valuable in the global economy.

In her forthcoming book on cross-border enforcement of patents Professor Trimble explores the challenges that patent holders face because of the existing patent regime, which despite the global use of inventions, still follows a country-by-country model for protecting those inventions. Notwithstanding efforts at the international level to create a system that would facilitate patenting in multiple countries, inventors still find the costs of doing so prohibitive. Most patent holders can patent their inventions in only one or a few countries and therefore relinquish the benefits from their inventions in much of the world. Professor Trimble uses examples from the United States and Germany – the two largest patent litigation venues in the world – to show how patent holders attempt to mitigate the problem by reaching activities in third countries through U.S. and German patent laws. Her book will be published by Oxford University Press in 2012.

In her research, which also concerns cross-border problems in copyright, Professor Trimble uses her broad experience, education and foreign language abilities. She came to the United States from Europe, where she worked as a lawyer for the government of the Czech Republic. In her capacity as head of the European Union Law Unit at the Czech Ministry of Justice, she prepared the country for membership in the European Union in the area of cross-border judicial cooperation, conflict of laws and enforcement of intellectual property. She represented the country in the committees of the European Commission, the executive body of the European Union, where she also worked as a national legal expert in Eurostat, the central statistical body of the European Union. After moving to the United States and interning for a judge she returned to law school and earned master’s and doctoral degrees at Stanford Law School to complement her master’s and doctoral degrees from the Czech Republic, all of which contribute to her valuable and unique background.