Brett M. Frischmann

Professor of Law

In 2017, I joined Villanova as The Charles Widger Endowed University Professor in Law, Business and Economics. In this new role, I will promote cross-campus research, programming and collaboration; foster high-visibility academic pursuits at the national and international levels; teach across the University; and aim to position Villanova as a thought leader and innovator at the intersection of law, business and economics. I also am an Affiliate Scholar of the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School and a Trustee for the Nexa Center for Internet & Society in Torino, Italy. I teach courses in intellectual property, Internet law, and technology policy. My research spans various disciplines and topics. Roughly speaking, my research cover three overlapping areas: infrastructure, knowledge commons, and techno-social engineering of humans (the relationships between the techno-social world and humanity).

In 2012, I published a book, Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources, with Oxford University Press. On this website you'll find information about the book, reviews, and past book events. Let me know if you're interested in more recent work. Find me on Twitter or my Villanova faculty page for email or telephone.

In 2014, Katherine Strandburg, Michael Madison and I published Governing Knowledge Commons, with Oxford University Press. This site has some information about that project under Commons Research, and you can find out much more at the Workshop on Governing Knowledge Commons website. Katherine, Mike and I signed a contract with Cambridge University Press to publish a book series focused on knowledge commons research--the Cambridge Studies on Governing Knowledge Commons. The first book in that series, Governing Medical Knowledge Commons, was published in 2017.

On April 19, 2018, Cambridge University Press published Re-Engineering Humanity, which I co-authored with Evan Selinger. For more details, check out the book website.

"Faculty and students across the social sciences and engineering will all find Brett Frischmann's new book to provide essential guidance for the analysis of diverse types of infrastructure resources and how policies affect the effectiveness, efficiency, fairness, and sustainability of outcomes. Rarely can one find such a broad and useful foundation for digging in and understanding the complexities of modern infrastructures. An extraordinary book."
- Elinor Ostrom, Indiana University, Co-Recipient, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, 2009.

"The book provides a new and productive way of analyzing all forms of infrastructure, especially those that are sources of major social value. Frischmann helps us recognize the importance of understanding how different types of policies balance provision and use. With its many fresh ideas, Infrastructure itself is likely to generate social value through additional research and the creation of innovative policies."
- Edella Schlager, An Uncommonly Open Approach, Science 337:156 (2012). See Media page for link to the full review.