Professor Vishnubhakat writes and teaches in intellectual property, civil procedure, and administrative law, particularly from an empirical perspective. Prior to joining the Texas A&M faculty, he was a faculty fellow at Duke Law School, where he taught patent law and studied the influence of patent policy on genomic innovation as well as the relationship between patent infringement and the general theory of tort law. Until 2015, he also served as the principal legal advisor to the first two chief economists of the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Professor Vishnubhakat’s research is published or forthcoming in the IP and technology journals of the Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Duke, and Berkeley law schools as well as the peer-reviewed Journal of Economic Perspectives and Journal of Law and the Biosciences. He is a co-author of the Graham-Vishnubhakat taxonomy for identifying software-related patents in policy analysis, which has been adopted in official reports of the U.S. government and the OECD. His first scholarly article, a detailed historical defense of pre-service removal from state to federal court, has been cited in federal judicial decisions resolving disputes over that strategy.
Professor Vishnubhakat holds J.D. and LL.M. degrees from the Franklin Pierce Law Center (now the University of New Hampshire School of Law), where he was an editor of the Law Review and an award-winning advocate in the Giles S. Rich Patent Moot Court. He earned a B.S. degree in biochemistry from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is admitted to the bars of the State of Illinois, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and the Supreme Court of the United States.