About

Amy Adler, the Emily Kempin Professor of Law at NYU School of Law, is one of the leading scholars of Art Law in the US. She teaches Art Law, First Amendment Law, and Feminist Jurisprudence at NYU Law, and lectures about these topics to a wide range of audiences in both art and law. Adler’s scholarship focuses on the persistent conflict between legal rules and cultural and artistic expression, addressing topics such as fair use, moral rights, online norms, authenticity, and the art market. Her recent scholarship concentrates on the role of copying—and copyright law—in contemporary culture, as well as the relationship between art and free speech. She graduated from Yale Law School, where she was a senior editor of the Yale Law Journal, and from Yale University, where she graduated summa cum laude, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and received the Marshall Allison Prize in arts and letters. Adler clerked for Judge John M. Walker Jr. of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Law and economics
• Sociology
• Art
• Computer Science
• Law
• Economics
• Social psychology
• Epistemology
• Psychology
• Philosophy
• Art history

Selected publications

• Against the Law

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Why Courts Should Not Interpret the Meaning of Art

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Editors' Introduction: Art beyond Copyright

  Grey Room · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Keynote Address: Adjudicating Art

  eYLS (Yale Law School) · 2024-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The keynote address critiques the Supreme Court's decision in Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith for its flawed approach to interpreting the meaning of art in copyright law, particularly in the context of fair use. It argues that courts are ill-equipped to determine the meaning of art, as art often resists reduction to discrete messages or meanings. The Court's reliance on visual analysis and its failure to provide clear guidance on how to assess meaning exacerbate these problems, leading to confusion in lower courts and potentially stifling artistic expression.

  Publisher

• Moral Rights: The Anti-copyright

  Grey Room · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  January 01 2024 Moral Rights: The Anti-copyright1 Amy Adler Amy Adler Amy Adler, the Emily Kempin Professor of Law at NYU School of Law, is one of the leading scholars of Art Law in the U.S. She teaches Art Law and Free Speech Law at NYU Law. Adler's scholarship focuses on the persistent conflict between legal rules and artistic expression. Her recent scholarship explores the role of copying—and copyright law—in contemporary culture. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Amy Adler Amy Adler, the Emily Kempin Professor of Law at NYU School of Law, is one of the leading scholars of Art Law in the U.S. She teaches Art Law and Free Speech Law at NYU Law. Adler's scholarship focuses on the persistent conflict between legal rules and artistic expression. Her recent scholarship explores the role of copying—and copyright law—in contemporary culture. Online ISSN: 1536-0105 Print ISSN: 1526-3819 © 2024 Amy Adler2024Amy Adler Grey Room (2024) (94): 63–66. https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00390 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Amy Adler; Moral Rights: The Anti-copyright. Grey Room 2024; (94): 63–66. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00390 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsGrey Room Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2024 Amy Adler2024Amy Adler Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

  PublisherDOI

• Roundtable on <i>Warhol v. Goldsmith</i>: An Introduction to <i>Warhol v. Goldsmith</i>

  Grey Room · 2024 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • Art history
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Artificial Authenticity: Art, NFTs, and the Death of Copyright

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Art
  • Law and economics
  PublisherDOI

• Memes on Memes and the New Creativity

  2021 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Computer Science
  • Political Science

  Memes are the paradigm of a new, flourishing creativity. Not only are these captioned images one of the most pervasive and important forms of online creativity, but they also upend many of copyright law’s fundamental assumptions about creativity, commercialization, and distribution. Chief among them is that copying is harmful. Not only does this mismatch threaten meme culture and expose fundamental problems in copyright law and theory, but the mismatch is even more significant because memes are far from an exceptional case. Indeed, memes are a prototype of a new mode of creativity that is emerging in our contemporary digital era, as can be seen across a range of works. Therefore, the concern with memes signals a much broader problem in copyright law and theory. That is not to say that the traditional creativity that copyright has long sought to protect is dead. Far from it. Both paths of creativity, traditional and new, can be vibrant. Yet we must be sensitive to the misfit between the new creativity and existing copyright law if we want the new creativity to continue to thrive.

• The Shifting Law of Sexual Speech: Rethinking Robert Mapplethorpe

  eYLS (Yale Law School) · 2020-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This Article explores the dramatic changes that have occurred over the last thirty years in the First Amendment doctrines governing sexual speech. As a prism through which to evaluate these changes, I consider the thirtieth anniversary of the landmark Robert Mapplethorpe trial, the first censorship prosecution against an art museum in the history of this country and the defining battle in the culture wars that roiled post-Reagan America. The target was the exhibition of formally beautiful, sexually hard-core photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe on view at a museum in Cincinnati. The controversy that erupted over those images—fueled by anxieties about AIDS, homosexuality, sadomasochism, race, government funding for the arts, and the vanishing boundary between art and pornography—spilled out of the courtroom into popular culture and into the halls of the United States Congress. I analyze the shifting trajectories over the years of the two legal doctrines that were at the center of the Mapplethorpe case—obscenity law and child pornography law—and I show the starkly divergent paths these two areas of law have taken. While obscenity law has receded in importance, and while the allegedly obscene photos from the trial have become prized in museums and in the art market, child pornography law has followed the opposite course. In contrast to the allegedly obscene pictures, which pose almost no legal risk today, the two photographs of children that were on trial have become more, not less, controversial over the past thirty years, to the point where curators are quietly reluctant to show these images at all. In my view, these photos now occupy a space of legal and moral uncertainty. What explains these differing legal and artistic trajectories? What happened to change the dynamics of showing these works? In tracing the divergent paths taken by these two doctrinal areas, I explore not only the stark changes in the law of sexual speech, but ultimately the mutually productive relationship between censorship law and culture. Free speech law governed this chapter in the culture wars, yet in surprising ways, the changing social norms unleashed by the culture wars have also governed free speech law.

  Publisher

• Taking Intellectual Property into Their Own Hands

  eYLS (Yale Law School) · 2019-01-01 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  When we think about people seeking relief for infringement of their intellectual property rights under copyright and trademark laws, we typically assume they will operate within an overtly legal scheme. By contrast, creators of works that lie outside the subject matter, or at least outside the heartland, of intellectual property law often remedy copying of their works by asserting extralegal norms within their own tight-knit communities. In recent years, however, there has been a growing third category of relief-seekers: those taking intellectual property into their own hands, seeking relief outside the legal system for copying of works that fall well within the heartland of copyright or trademark laws, such as visual art, music, and fashion. They exercise intellectual property self-help in a constellation of ways. Most frequently, they use shaming, principally through social media or a similar platform, to call out perceived misappropriations. Other times, they reappropriate perceived misappropriations, therein generating new creative works. This Article identifies, illustrates, and analyzes this phenomenon using a diverse array of recent examples. Aggrieved creators can use self-help of the sorts we describe to accomplish much of what they hope to derive from successful infringement litigation: collect monetary damages, stop the appropriation, insist on attribution of their work, and correct potential misattributions of a misappropriation. We evaluate the benefits and demerits of intellectual property self-help as compared with more traditional intellectual property enforcement.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jeanne C. Fromer

  New York Law School

  9 shared

• Noam M. Elcott

  Columbia University

  2 shared

• Lionel Bently

  University of Cambridge

  2 shared

• R. Harrison

  2 shared

• Johanna Burton

  1 shared

• Joan Kee

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  1 shared

• Museo cantonale d'arte

  1 shared

• Branden W. Joseph

  Columbia University

  1 shared

Education

• B.A.

  Yale University

• Other

  Yale Law School

Awards & honors

• Marshall Allison Prize in the arts and letters