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Peter K. Yu (余家明) is University Distinguished Professor, Regents Professor of Law and Communication and Director of the Center for Law and Intellectual Property at Texas A&M University.  Before joining Texas A&M University, he held the Kern Family Chair in Intellectual Property Law and was the founding director of the Intellectual Property Law Center at Drake University Law School.  In summer, he has returned repeatedly to his hometown to serve as a visiting professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Hong Kong and to teach in the Summer Programme on International Intellectual Property organized by the World Trade Institute at the University of Bern and the Faculty of Law at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

From 2008-2011, he served as Wenlan Scholar Chair Professor (文澜学者讲座教授) at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law in Wuhan, China and a research fellow of its Center for Studies of Intellectual Property Rights. He was also a visiting professor of law at Washington and Lee University School of Law, the Centre for International Intellectual Property Studies (CEIPI) at the University of Strasbourg in France, the Buchmann Faculty of Law at Tel Aviv University and the University of Haifa Faculty of Law in Israel, Hanken School of Economics and the University of Helsinki Faculty of Law in Finland, Bocconi University School of Law in Italy and the Graduate School of Law at Hokkaido University in Japan. In addition, he is an affiliated scholar at IP Osgoode at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University in Canada.

Born and raised in Hong Kong, Professor Yu is a leading expert in international intellectual property and communications law.  He also writes and lectures extensively on intellectual property, international trade, communications policy, international and comparative law, and the transition of the legal systems in China and Hong Kong.  Ranked among the Top 50 Law Authors in the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), he is the author or editor of seven books and more than 200 law review articles and book chapters.  His latest publications include The Global Governance of HIV/AIDS: Intellectual Property and Access to Essential Medicines (Edward Elgar Publishing 2013), Global Issues in Intellectual Property Law (Thomson West 2010) and a four-volume reference book set entitled Intellectual Property and Information Wealth: Issues and Practices in the Digital Age (Praeger Publishers 2007).

A frequent commentator in the national and international media, he has spoken at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, U.C. Berkeley, Chicago, Michigan, Penn, Virginia, Georgetown,  McGill, Toronto, London School of Economics, University of London, Edinburgh, Hebrew, Humboldt, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beida, Tsinghua, Fudan, Academia Sinica and other leading research institutions from around the world. He has also spoken at events organized by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the World Trade Organization, the International Telecommunication Union, the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as well as the Chinese, EU and U.S. governments.

He speaks and writes in Chinese and English. His publications have appeared in both languages and have been translated into Arabic, French. Hausa, Japanese, Persian, Portuguese, Spanish and Vietnamese.  His lectures and presentations have spanned over 30 countries on all continents except Antarctica.  These countries include Argentina, Australia, Austria, Barbados, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China (including Hong Kong and Macau), Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, India, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Licensed to practice law in the State of New York and before the United States Supreme Court, Professor Yu has been the board of directors, and previously the executive committee, of the American Branch of the International Law Association since October 2006.  He serves as the Branch's Vice-President and was one of its longest serving directors of studies (for close to eight years). An elected member of the American Law Institute, he has served as the general editor of The WIPO Journal published by WIPO and is a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Copyright Society of the U.S.A and the Journal of World Intellectual Property. He is also a board member of the Asia Pacific Innovation Network, a cross-disciplinary network with institutional partners from the Asia Pacific region. He served as the co-chair of the International Law Weekend in 2006 and 2016 and the host of the 11th Conference of Asian Pacific American Law Faculty (CAPALF).

Before joining Drake University, he taught at Michigan State University College of Law and founded its nationally-renowned Intellectual Property & Communications Law Program.  He was a member of the core faculty of the Asian Studies Center and held a courtesy appointment in the Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media at Michigan State University.  He was also a faculty associate of The James H. and Mary B. Quello Center for Telecommunication Management & Law.

In 2007, he won both the MSU Teacher-Scholar Award and the Student Bar Association's Distinguished Faculty Award, for which he was nominated three times in his four years at MSU.  He was also inducted into the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi as a faculty member.  During his tenure at Michigan State, the U.S. News and World Reports ranked the MSU Intellectual Property & Communications Law Program the best among the Big 10 law schools and one of the top 20 programs in the country.

Prior to joining Michigan State University, he was Acting Assistant Professor of Law, the first executive director of the Intellectual Property Law Program, and deputy director of the Howard M. Squadron Program in Law, Media & Society at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University, where he taught immediately after law school graduation.  He was also a research associate of the Programme in Comparative Media Law & Policy at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford.

During his tenure at Cardozo, the U.S. News and World Reports consistently ranked the Cardozo Intellectual Property Law Program among the top five programs in the country.  He co-founded both the Annual Intellectual Property Scholars Conference, which rotates among Cardozo, DePaul, Stanford and U.C. Berkeley, and the Annual Chinese Internet Research Conference, which has been held at USC Annenberg, U.C. Berkeley, NTU, HKU, U Penn Annenberg, Peking, Oxford, Fudan and Leiden.

While in New York, he sat on the Board of Directors of the Asian American Bar Association of New York and served on the association's Litigation Committee. He is also a member of the Young Lawyers Committee of the Intellectual Property Law Section of the New York State Bar Association and a director of the U.S.-China Lawyers Society.  In addition, he was the founding managing editor of Communications Law in Transition Newsletter and was in charge of media law projects with USAID, IREX, and the European Commission.

Professor Yu received his J.D. from Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University, where he served as Executive Editor of the Cardozo Law Review, Managing Editor of the Post-Soviet Media Law & Policy Newsletter, and Assistant Editor of the Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature (now Law and Literature).  He is a member of the Order of the Coif and was a Dr. Samuel Belkin Scholar and a member of the Cardozo Basketball Team.  Upon graduation, he received the Dr. Samuel Belkin Service Award for exceptional contributions to the continued growth of the Law School and the prestigious Alumni Association Scholarship.  He is also a winner of three writing competitions, including the Gerald Rose Memorial Competition and the Nathan Burkan Memorial Writing Competition.

He received a B.A. in English and Political Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was the President of the Billiards Club and the Vice-President of the Chinese Student Association (Hong Kong).  He represented the University in the Big Ten Pool Tournament and repeatedly in the ACUI Regional Pool Tournament.  In 1994, he participated in the 7th Annual Wisconsin State Team Championships in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin.

His interests include travel, ethnic food, classical music, Broadway musicals, basketball, snooker and pool, bowling, reading mysteries and books on history and international politics, and cheering for the L.A. Lakers (which he has supported since the mid-1980s).  When he is not traveling, he divides his time among Fort Worth, Hong Kong and cyberspace.

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