About

Shyamkrishna Balganesh is the Sol Goldman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, where he joined the faculty in 2021. His academic work focuses on copyright law, intellectual property, and legal theory, with extensive writings on how intellectual property and innovation policy can benefit from ideas, concepts, and structures from different areas of the common law, especially private law. His recent research explores the interaction between copyright law and key institutional features of the American legal system, as well as developing an account of 'legal internalism' that explains the shape and trajectory of legal thinking. Balganesh has written and taught in his areas of expertise, contributing to leading law journals and co-authoring sections of the prominent copyright law treatise Nimmer on Copyright. Before his appointment at Columbia, he was a professor of law and co-director of the Center for Technology, Innovation and Competition at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, and prior to that, a Bigelow Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School. He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was an articles and essays editor of the Yale Law Journal, and was a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford, earning a B.C.L. and M.Phil. His work has been recognized with awards for teaching excellence, and he is a member of the American Law Institute, advising the Restatement of the Law, Copyright.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Economics
• Law
• Law and economics
• Philosophy
• Business
• Engineering
• Environmental ethics
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• Legal Internalism: A Behavioral Theory

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Eunomics of Intellectual Property

  2026-02-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Originally developed by the legal theorist Lon L. Fuller, eunomics is the “study of good order and workable arrangements,” directed at understanding the structure, form, or ordering adopted by an area of law. Yet, unlike the ordinary analysis of institutional design, eunomics views the form adopted by an area of law as neither preordained nor wholly contingent. Instead, eunomics sees form as playing an important role in clarifying and developing the goals of an area through a means-ends interaction. This Article develops the central insights of Fuller’s eunomics project for intellectual property. Until now, most theoretical accounts of intellectual property have paid surprisingly little attention to the unique structure and form that each intellectual-property regime embodies and have focused instead on justifying or explaining each regime’s core substantive goals and values in the abstract. In so doing, they have neglected the crucial importance that each regime’s particularized form has on the construction and realization of those values. This Article develops a eunomics-driven typology of intellectual-property forms: the appropriation form, the grant form, and the use-and-registration form. It reveals how each of these forms embodies its own normative structure, value commitments, and conception of institutional authority for lawmaking. And it shows how theorizing about intellectual property and its values remains grossly incomplete without greater engagement with each individual area’s underlying structure.

  Publisher

• Legal Internalism as a Mode of Reasoning

  The American Journal of Jurisprudence · 2025-10-18

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Despite the often-repeated claim that “we are all realists now,” legal reasoning remains rule-driven, conceptual, deductive, and heavily path-dependent. Indeed, this remains true notwithstanding recognition that adjudication involves law-making and that “judge-made” law is real. In this article, we argue that legal reasoning adheres to a phenomenon that is best described as “legal internalism,” which recognizes that doctrine and rules play three critical functions: “translation,” “saliencing,” and “normativization.” In this article, we show how legal internalism operates as a method of reasoning independent of both Legal Realism and Legal Formalism, recognizing an important role for rules, while at the same time accepting the need to balance reason with authority.

  PublisherDOI

• Intellectual Property in the New Technological Age 2025: Volume I Chapters 1&2--Perspectives, Trade Secrets

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• <b>The Eunomics of Intellectual Property</b>

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Legal Internalism as a Mode of Reasoning

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Going “Beyond” Mere Transformation: Warhol and Reconciliation of the Derivative Work Right and Fair Use

  The Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts · 2024-09-29

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith is a watershed moment in the story of copyright jurisprudence. At its broadest, the decision articulates a unified vision—one that had been dormant in the lower court fair use jurisprudence—about the role of copyright and the manner in which to make sense of its effort to balance exclusivity with its myriad limitations. This Essay focuses on how the Court reconciled the working of the statute’s derivative work right with the breadth and reach of the “transformative use” version of the fair use doctrine. The core of the Court’s reconciliation centers around three ideas. The first is the need for an independent justification for a use to even qualify for fair use. Transformation on its own does not provide such a justification, which must be instead identified independently. Related is the second idea, that the secondary use must reveal a distinct purpose. Unlike the justification element, this step is comparative and heavily contextual. And the third element is the balance between transformativeness and commerciality, which the legislative text makes clear and Campbell had gone to extreme lengths to reinforce.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• <b>Interactional Ordering: Reconstructing Lon Fuller's Theory of Private Law</b>

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Interactional Ordering: Reconstructing Lon Fuller’s Theory of Private Law

  The American Journal of Jurisprudence · 2024-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract While Lon Fuller is best remembered for his contributions to the fields of general jurisprudence and contract law, his work in each has long been seen as unrelated to the other. This Article shows that in a significantly underappreciated body of work, Fuller did connect the two and, in the process, developed the outlines of a robust theory of private law, best characterized as “interactional ordering.” Driven by Fuller’s efforts to develop a jurisprudence of form that was derived from conventionalism and natural law thinking, interactional ordering sees all normativity as originating in horizontal interactions between individuals in society, seeking to realize their freedom socially. This horizontal normativity forms the very substantive and structural basis for the common law as a mechanism of enforcement, and emerges as the principal end that all other forms of legal and social ordering are ultimately structured around. This Article reconstructs the central tenets of interactional ordering from Fuller’s work and shows how it represents a sophisticated account of how private law normativity operates, one that abjures commitments to both Legal Positivism and Legal Realism, a move that was central to Fuller’s overall jurisprudential worldview.

  PublisherDOI

• Intellectual Property in the New Technological Age: 2023

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023 · 267 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Law and economics
  • Business
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Peter S. Menell

  29 shared

• Ted M. Sichelman

  13 shared

• Robert P. Merges

  8 shared

• Mark A. Lemley

  7 shared

• David Nimmer

  University of California, Los Angeles

  5 shared

• Frederick Schauer

  4 shared

• Christopher M. Newman

  4 shared

• Anna di Robilant

  4 shared

Education

• Other

  Balliol College, Oxford

• Other

  Balliol College, Oxford

• Other, articles and essays editor of the Yale Law Journal, student fellow at the Information Society Project

  Yale Law School

Awards & honors

• Robert A. Gorman Award for Excellence in Teaching (2017)
• A. Leo Levin Award for Teaching Excellence in an Introductor…
• Member of the American Law Institute (2017)