Christopher S. Gibson

Christopher Gibson is an Associate Dean and Professor of Law at Suffolk University Law School in Boston, where he teaches and writes in the areas of domestic and international arbitration, international business transactions, international trade and investment law, intellectual property, and Internet law. He was the 2008 recipient of Suffolk Law School's highest teaching honor, the Cornelius J. Moynihan Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Prior to joining Suffolk’s faculty, Professor Gibson has had a successful career of service in the public international and private sectors. Following law school, Professor Gibson clerked for a United States District Court judge in San Francisco, then served as a Legal Assistant at the Iran-United States Claim Tribunal in The Hague, and was later engaged in legal practice in San Francisco. Professor Gibson next served for four years as Senior Legal Officer for the United Nations Compensation Commission in Geneva (Head of the "C" Claims Division), followed by a four year period as Head of the Electronic Commerce Law Section of the World Intellectual Property Organization (“WIPO”) in Geneva. Before joining the Suffolk faculty, Professor Gibson was a founding partner in the London office of the U.S law firm, Steptoe & Johnson LLP, where he specialized in technology law, intellectual property and international dispute resolution.

Professor Gibson’s practice experience as counsellor and advocate spans both sides of the Atlantic, and he has acted as lead counsel in arbitrations with sums in dispute ranging from $5 million to more than $350 million and involving intellectual property, international supply and framework contracts, distribution and licensing agreements, joint ventures, telecommunications, investment disputes, and arbitral award enforcement. He has extensive advocacy experience before courts, arbitral tribunals, government agencies and international organizations. He has advised on dispute resolution systems and procedures for domain name disputes, on-line ecommerce, and the U.S. national title insurance industry.

Professor Gibson is Vice-Chair of the Academic Council of the Institute of Transnational Arbitration (ITA) and was co-chair for the ITA’s 2010 Annual Conference on International Arbitration. He is currently also a co-chair of the Boston Bar Association’s International Law and Human Rights Section. He is a founder (on behalf of Suffolk) and Co-Director of Foreign Direct Investment International Moot Court Competition. He is a former Chair of the Intellectual Property Interest Group section of the American Society of International Law.

Education:

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, BOALT HALL SCHOOL OF LAW

J.D., 1988

HARVARD UNIVERSITY, KENNEDY SCHOOL OF GOVERNMENT

Master of Public Policy (M.P.P.), 1984

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

B.A., European and English History, 1982

Publications:

Designing Compensation After Upheaval: Insights from the Experience of the United Nations Compensation Commission, with Timothy Feighery & Cymie Payne, Oxford Univ. Press (Forthcoming 2011)

Latent Grounds for Investor-State Arbitration: Do International Investment Agreements Provide a Powerful New Means to Enforce Intellectual Property Rights? (in Karl P. Sauvant ed., YEARBOOK ON INTERNATIONAL INVESTMENT LAW & POLICY 2009-2010, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY VALE CENTER)

A Look at the Compulsory License in Investment Arbitration: the Case of Indirect Expropriation, 25 AM. U. INT’L L. REV. 1 (Fall 2010).

Arbitration, Civilization and Public Policy: Seeking Counterpoise between Arbitral Autonomy and the Public Policy Defense in View of Foreign Mandatory Public Law, 113 PENN ST. L. REV. 101 (Spring 2009)

Globalization and the Technology Standards Game: Balancing Concerns of Protectionism and Intellectual Property in International Standards, 22 BERKELEY TECH. L.J. 1401 (2007)

THE IRAN-UNITED STATES CLAIMS TRIBUNAL AT 25: THE CASES EVERYONE NEEDS TO KNOW FOR INVESTOR-STATE AND INTERNATIONAL ARBITRATION, with Prof. Christopher Drahozal, Oxford Univ. Press (2007).

Chapter: Technology Standards - New Technical Barriers to Trade? in THE STANDARDS EDGE, Sherrie Bolin ed. (Stanford Univ. Press 2007).

Iran-United States Claims Tribunal Precedent in Investor-State Arbitration, with Prof. Christopher Drahozal, 23 J. INT'L ARB. 521 (2006)

WIPO Copyright Treaties Coming into Force, Computer and Recht Int'l. (2002)

Intellectual Property Issues and Standards, 11:5 Multilingual Computing and Tech. (2000)

Chapter: The Domain Name System and Issues for Developing Countries, in E-COMMERCE AND DEVELOPMENT REPORT 2002, UNCTAD/SDTE/ECB/2, (2002)

The EU Copyright Directive – UK Implementation, Convergence (January 2003)

IP Audits in the Internet Age, with Dudley Kneller, World eBusiness Law Report (2002)

New Numbering Convention by Oftel, Convergence (February 2002)

Ralph Lauren Loses String of UDRP Cases, Electronic Business Law (Aug. 2002)

State of Play for E-Commerce Directive, Convergence (July 2002).

Keeping the Confidence in International Arbitration, ICC Members Handbook (2002)

Digital Dispute Resolution, Internet Domain Names and WIPO's Role, Computer und Recht International (February 2001); re-published in The California International Lawyer.

Chapter: The Role of Intellectual Property: Creating a Positive Environment for Electronic Commerce," contribution to book by The Commonwealth Business Council titled E-COMM3: COMMONWEALTH, COMMERCE AND COMMUNICATIONS (Nov. 2000).

Intellectual Property Issues and Standards, 11 Multilingual Computing and Technology, No. 33, Issue 5 (Aug. 2000).

WIPO Primer on Electronic Commerce and Intellectual Property, Editor and Principal Author, WIPO/OLOA/EC/PRIMER (May 2000).

Awards and Other Decisions, 9 Amer. Review Int’l Arb., Parker School of Foreign and Comparative Law, Columbia University (1998).

Enforcement of Foreign Judgments, International Litigation, The International Business Lawyer (Summer 1997).

Using Computers to Evaluate Claims at the United Nations Compensation Commission, Arbitration International, 13 J.London Ct. Int’l Arb., No. 2 (1997).

Arbitration in International Intellectual Property Disputes, The California International Practitioner, Vol. 8, No. 1 (1997).

Chapter: Mass Claims Processing: Techniques for Processing Over 400,000 Claims for Individual Loss at the United Nations Compensation Commission, in THE UNITED NATIONS COMPENSATION COMMISSION, Richard B. Lillich ed. (Transnational Publishers 1995) (Thirteenth Sokol Colloquium on International Law, University of Virginia Law School (1994)).

Proposed Regulations Implementing the "Single Class of Stock, Requirement for S Corporations Create Tremendous Furor and Needless Complexity," with Stuart S. Lipton, 8 J. Taxation of Investments 334 (1991).

Note, Narrow Grounds for a Complex Decision: The Supreme Court's Review of an Agency's Statutory Construction in Japan Whaling Association v. American Cetacean Society, 14 Ecology Law Quarterly 485 (1987).

Creative Oil Stockpiling: Evaluating a Three Country Agreement and Designing a Negotiating Strategy, published by Energy and Environmental Policy Center, Harvard University Energy Security Program and submitted to United States Department of State (H-84-03(1984).