Research
Scholarship at the intersection of
copyright doctrine, feminist theory,
and interdisciplinary legal analysis.
“With the Right Lawyers”: The Artist Corporation and the Ecosystem It Requires
Forthcoming
Colorado Senate Bill 26-133, the Colorado Artist Company Act, would create a new specialized LLC variant — the Artist Corporation, or “A-Corp” — designed to give artists access to sophisticated corporate governance without expensive legal counsel. The premise is the problem.
Corporate forms derive their power not from their enabling statutes but from the practitioner ecosystems that accumulate around them over time: specialist lawyers, trained judges, developing case law, market legibility. Delaware’s dominance as the incorporation jurisdiction of choice for the Fortune 500 is not explained by its statute. Nevada and Wyoming have tried to compete on statute; neither has displaced Delaware. What Delaware built is a three-legged stool — specialized corporate law finely tuned by practitioners over generations, a Court of Chancery with deep subject-matter expertise, and a body of case law so thick that sophisticated parties know in advance how disputes will be resolved. The A-Corp has none of these legs on day one and, by design, suppresses formation of the first leg among exactly the population that needs it most.
The article's doctrinal contribution is specific to my training. The A-Corp statute borrows vocabulary directly from copyright law — “works of authorship,” “artistic expression,” “relates to the artistic mission” — without importing the interpretive apparatus that makes that vocabulary workable. These are terms of art under 17 U.S.C. § 102(a) and related doctrine, developed across decades of federal case law. A Colorado general jurisdiction court encountering them for the first time, without a specialist bar to bring coherent theories, will improvise. The Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 demonstrates what thirty-five years of improvisation produces: a right on paper and a vacuum in practice.
The article is prescriptive, not polemical. The A-Corp should succeed. Part IV is a manual for what success actually requires: bar section programming, law school clinical integration, foundation-directed practitioner education, well-counseled test cases, and a uniform act process for multi-state expansion.
Article in review. Submission target August 2026.
Lady Justice’s Male Gaze: Kagan’s Art History in Warhol v. Goldsmith
Forthcoming
Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent in Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith is widely read as a defense of artistic freedom. It is also a defense of a very particular idea of what art is — one inherited from a narrow, male-dominated lineage of twentieth-century criticism — and importing that lineage uncritically into copyright law has distributional consequences.
Kagan’s reasoning about what Warhol did to Goldsmith’s photograph traces directly to a mid-century critical tradition: Clement Greenberg's formalism, Rosalind Krauss's theory of the simulacrum, Hal Foster's The Return of the Real, Arthur Danto’s institutional theory of art. This is an influential lineage, but it was built around certain kinds of predominantly male artistic practice and resistant to others. Treating it as a neutral aesthetic framework in a legal opinion encodes one tradition’s definition of transformative art into law while rendering other traditions — including traditions more associated with women's creative labor — less legible as “art” in the statutory sense.
The argument is not that Kagan is wrong as a matter of copyright doctrine. It is that her aesthetic premises are not neutral, and the amicus briefs that influenced her drew from a limited, androcentric set of art historical resources.
Article in development. Submission target February 2027.
Mining Raw Materials: Copyright, Contemporary Art, and False Dichotomies
Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 9, no. 1 (Spring 2023)
Fair use scholarship has a structural blind spot: it built its theory of transformation around a handful of blue-chip artists — Koons, Prince, the Warhol Foundation — and then treated those market outliers as the universal case. The doctrine that emerged divides artists into geniuses and raw material, protects the former, and leaves the latter to produce content for the overculture. Tech companies noticed. The same legal logic that shielded appropriation art now underwrites AI training data extraction.
This article traces how postmodern art theory entered copyright jurisprudence, why lawyers using it made poor advisors to artists, and what a more expansive framework — drawing on feminist theory, postcolonial criticism, and theories of intersectionality — would actually require. The path forward is not a larger fair use doctrine. It is a shift toward collaborative cultures and extralegal customs that the current framework has foreclosed.
‘The Compliment of Suppression’: Censorship of Political Caricature in the July Monarchy and the George W. Bush Administration
In Lines of Attack: Conflicts in Caricature. Duke University Press, 2010.
State censorship is a blunt instrument. Cultural censorship — the kind that operates through employers, advertisers, and readers — is far more effective, because it is invisible and self-reinforcing. This essay argues that contemporary American political cartoonists are not free despite the First Amendment; they are constrained by a system of nongovernmental pressures that functions more efficiently than the draconian censorship laws of nineteenth-century France ever did. Drawing on the July Monarchy’s prosecution of Honoré Daumier and Charles Philipon alongside the post-September 11 suppression of American editorial cartoonists, the essay traces how concentrated media ownership, advertiser anxiety, and audience intolerance combine to produce a cartoonist who self-censors — not because the government compels it, but because the market does. “Humor is considered subversive by the powers that be, who often pay it the compliment of suppression.” In a democracy, we are the powers that be.
The Treachery of Insitutions: In Rem Rights and In Personam Fictions in Fair Use
Forthcoming
Artists’ estates are not artists. They are corporate entities that have inherited rights — and the distinction matters legally, even when courts have not enforced it.
When the Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith decision landed in 2023, the Foundation’s arguments — and much of the surrounding commentary — treated the institution's interests as continuous with Warhol's own creative identity. This article argues that is exactly backward. The in rem copyright transfer at death is precisely what severs the estate from the artist’s in personam attributes: the creative intent, personal meaning, and interpretive authority that attach to a person, not a property interest. Courts that fail to enforce that severance enable estates to monopolize an artist’s meaning in ways the law does not authorize.
The article applies classical property theory — the distinction between rights in rem (against the world, attached to the thing) and rights in personam (against specific persons, attached to relationships) — to fair use doctrine in copyright law. A Lexis database search confirmed that this specific doctrinal framing has not been previously attempted: four results for “artist’s estate” combined with “fair use” across the full Lexis database. The gap in the literature is the occasion for the article.
The title is an echo of Magritte’s The Treachery of Images. The painting of a pipe is not a pipe. The estate of an artist is not an artist.
Research complete. Submission target February 2027.
Recursive Enclosure: Movement That Generates Itself
Forthcoming
When AI companies train their models on copyrighted creative work without permission, they are not only taking content — they are building infrastructure that requires physical land, water, and forest to operate. These two forms of taking are not parallel developments — they feed each other.
Recursive enclosure is an original theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between intellectual property enclosure and physical land enclosure in the age of AI. The loop runs as follows: AI companies train on copyrighted creative works (IP enclosure); the computational infrastructure required to process that training demands massive physical resources — data centers, power plants, cooling systems, land (physical enclosure); the physical infrastructure then enables the next, larger cycle of data extraction and training (more IP enclosure), which demands more infrastructure (more physical enclosure). Each cycle enables and requires the next.
The materialist feminist framework in its method, not merely its conclusions. It asks the questions feminist legal analysis requires — who owns the means of production, whose labor is extracted, who bears the environmental cost — and applies them simultaneously to two domains that IP law and land use law treat as separate: the digital commons and the physical commons. The feminist dimension is specific: the creative labor being extracted without compensation is disproportionately women’s, and the land being consumed for data infrastructure is disproportionately land on which marginalized communities depend. Silvia Federici’s analysis of primitive accumulation — the argument that capitalism requires ongoing enclosure of the commons — is the theoretical ancestor. The recursive loop is what happens when that accumulation is automated and accelerating.
This research is in active development on Protect Your Magic, where the series is anchored locally in UNC’s development of the Carolina North forest for research and data infrastructure, making the abstract loop concrete.
The full analysis draws from feminist commons theory, Indigenous land rights frameworks, and reproductive labor theory to identify ways to recognize and break this loop.
Article in development. Submission target August 2027.
‘A Dangerous Undertaking: Appropriation Art, Intellectual Property, and Fair Use Since the 1990s
Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University, 2017
Advisors: Kristine Stiles and Hans J. Van Miegroet
Duke University Library
A historical examination of the role of appropriation in twentieth and twenty-first century American art, arguing for the complementarity of legal and art historical research in understanding it. The history of appropriation art is indissolubly interconnected with changes in intellectual property law — and a history of contemporary appropriation requires an interdisciplinary approach, employing art historical, legal, and economic theory to examine the interrelations between appropriation art, postmodern theory, and the doctrine of fair use.
The dissertation distinguishes between the art historical and legal definitions of appropriation, traces both through academic criticism, museum exhibitions, and case law, and differentiates economic claims about artistic property rights from legal ones. It concludes that transformative use is a valuable framework for understanding appropriation, but that judges cannot be expected to determine whether a work is transformative without expert guidance — preferably from artists themselves — and recommends that artists participate actively in the development of an ethical fair use.