The following is a formal biography suitable for cutting and pasting into editorial and promotional materials. It is designed to be shorted by cutting from the bottom up.
Professor Michael Madison is a Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh. He is a Senior Scholar with the University of Pittsburgh Institute for Cyber Law, Policy, and Security (Pitt Cyber). At Pitt Law, he is Faculty Director of the Future Law Project and a John E. Murray Faculty Scholar.
Professor Madison’s research focuses on institutions for producing, storing, and distributing knowledge. The scope of his writing includes information, data, creativity, innovation, and art. Specific scholarly interests range from the development of research universities to patent history, from the law of fair use and production of conceptual art to legal rules governing data, network security, and computer software.
Professor Madison is the author of more than 70 journal articles and book chapters, the co-author of The Law of Intellectual Property (Wolters Kluwer, 5th edition 2017), and the co-editor of Governing Knowledge Commons (Oxford University Press, 2014), Governing Medical Knowledge Commons (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and Governing Smart Cities as Knowledge Commons (Cambridge University Press, 2023).
He is a co-Principal Investigator of the Workshop on Governing Knowledge Commons global research collaborative and a series editor of the Cambridge University Press Studies in Governing Knowledge Commons series. He is a founder and leader of Future Law Works, an independent corps of volunteer leaders focused on the futures of legal education and other institutions of the legal system.
He is an Affiliate Researcher with the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University, with the EDHEC Business School Augmented Law Institute in Lille, France, and with the Center for Governance and Markets at the University of Pittsburgh. He holds a secondary appointment as Professor in the University of Pittsburgh Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI).
Professor Madison’s awards and distinctions include the Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award at Pitt, the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award at Pitt, a fellowship from the Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers project at the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System (IAALS) in Denver, and election to membership in the American Law Institute in 2016. In 2014, he was awarded the Yale Medal by Yale University.
He has been a social media creator and publisher for more than 20 years, starting with blogs titled “Pittsblog” and “Madisonian.net.” From time to time, he publishes The Future Law Podcast, together with Dan Hunter, Executive Dean of the Dickson Poon School of Law at King’s College London; Your Leadership Podcast; and a Substack newsletter titled “Everything in Between,” about institutions and governance.
Before becoming a law professor in 1997, he practiced law for nearly 10 years in San Francisco and Silicon Valley.