Inaugural Allen Grubman Chair, Professor Seán O’Connor, Brings Vision for Brooklyn Law School’s Next Act in Media and Entertainment Law
Professor Seán O’Connor—musician, composer, intellectual property and entrepreneurship scholar, author, and teacher—brings to Brooklyn Law School an expansive vision for the future of entertainment law. As the inaugural Allen Grubman Chair in Media and Entertainment Law, O’Connor joined the faculty on July 1 with plans to develop a world-class entertainment law program—laying the groundwork for a future Entertainment Law Center at Brooklyn Law School.
Innovation is at the heart of O’Connor’s plans, reflected in their own career, most recently at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, where they served as professor of law and faculty director for the Center for Intellectual Property x Innovation Policy (C-IP2). O’Connor was also founding faculty director for Scalia Law’s Innovation Law Clinic, where teams of students counsel entrepreneurs, creators, and inventors in business and IP law issues affecting commercialization of innovation and creativity. They formerly taught at the University of Washington School of Law for 16 years, leading the Center for Advanced Studies and Research on Intellectual Property (CASRIP) and the IP LL.M. program, as well as designing and launching the pioneering Entrepreneurial Law Clinic that teamed JD and MBA students to support inventors and creators from UW’s internal and external communities.
Widely published in law reviews and journals, O’Connor is the author of Method+ology and the Means of Innovation (forthcoming, Oxford University Press, 2026) and editor of the Oxford Handbook on Music Law & Policy (forthcoming, Oxford University Press, 2025). They were the editor (with Jonathan Barnett) of 5G and Beyond: Intellectual Property and Competition Policy in the Internet of Things (Cambridge University Press, 2023), and founder and executive director of the nonprofit Music Ecosystems Institute in Washington, D.C.
At Brooklyn Law, O’Connor will focus this rich background on the entertainment ecosystem. Preliminary courses include Contracts and a new Music Law class based on the Oxford Handbook. In development is an advanced topics course in entertainment law, leveraging the deep expertise of famed music lawyer and BLS alumnus Allen Grubman and other members of his firm. The course will emphasize deal-making and other business issues at the heart of the entertainment ecosystem: “These are the kind of things that law schools often don't teach, yet are the most important for students’ career development,” O’Connor said.
To bolster students’ hands-on experience in the entertainment space, O’Connor will work with Professor Jonathan Askin, Director of the Brooklyn Law Incubator and Policy Clinic (BLIP), to expand BLIP by adding a new Creators’ Clinic within it. “We need to support the world-renowned creative community right here in Brooklyn, because we are Brooklyn’s law school,” O’Connor notes.
Building on two decades of leading top-ranked intellectual property centers, O’Connor now aims to channel that experience into creating Brooklyn Law’s own hub for entertainment and media law. The goal is to make BLS a global focal point for cutting-edge discussions at the intersection of creativity, technology, and law. “We want to bring the world to Brooklyn and Brooklyn to the world,” says O’Connor. Having previously elevated two IP centers into the U.S. News Top 20, they plan to do the same here—building on BLS’s longstanding reputation for producing leading entertainment lawyers, including Allen Grubman himself. Programming will include international conferences, a new entertainment law journal, and experiential opportunities through the planned Creators’ Clinic.
O’Connor is a natural for leading a center at the intersection of creativity, technology, and law—areas that have defined their life. As a professional musician for twelve years who built and modified much of their own electric guitar gear and studied electrical engineering, they understand how technology inspires creativity. As a graduate student in the history and philosophy of science and technology, they developed a keen understanding of how innovation happens over time. And as a lawyer and policy advocate for both technology and creative companies, they have worked with major industry, government, and NGO players in shaping law and policy in this space. “Law and policy have not focused enough on technology’s role in music and other entertainment areas,” O’Connor adds. “When you work with the industry, you realize how much technology drives all of the innovative entertainment modes.”
While a full-time working musician, O’Connor earned a bachelor’s degree in the history of technology and culture from the University of Massachusetts, and an M.A. in the philosophy of science from Arizona State University, where they wrote and published “The Supreme Court’s Philosophy of Science: Will the Real Karl Popper Please Stand Up?” 35 Jurimetrics J. 263 (1995), which fueled an interest in the law.
They went on to receive their J.D. from Stanford Law School, where they were co-founder and executive director of the Stanford Technology Law Review, as well as executive editor of the Stanford Law Review. They practiced business and IP law at major international law firms in New York and Boston before taking on their first academic post at the University of Pittsburgh. They have been a visiting professor at University of California Berkeley, George Washington University, Boston College, Université de Bourgogne (France), Katholiek Université (Belgium), and Université de Strasbourg (France). They have also served as general counsel to Rhizome.org, Mensa, and the now-defunct RockStar Motel start-up, as well as Of Counsel to Seed IP Law Group and Graham & Dunn (now Miller Nash Graham & Dunn) in Seattle.
Returning to New York to assume the Grubman Chair and help build Brooklyn Law’s future entertainment law center feels like coming full circle for O’Connor. It brings them closer to family with deep roots in the area and allows them to focus on music and entertainment law—a creative convergence of everything they’ve studied and lived.
“Focusing on IP was a perfect match that allowed me to pull science, technology, and creativity together,” O’Connor said. “Scientists are creative, technologists are creative, and creators are inventive. At their core, these are all acts of imagination—of envisioning a new world and creating the tools to get there.”
And if the approach O’Connor takes to creating new student pathways to entertainment law resembles their open, improvisatory style when performing music, there will be many collaborative projects on the horizon. “When I perform, I don’t have a set list most nights,” O’Connor said. “I think, what does the audience want to hear? What do I want to play? It’s a communing you have with them that makes each performance magic.”