Areas of Expertise
Biotechnology, Intellectual Property, Patent Law
Courses
Patent Law
Biography
Professor Margo A. Bagley is an Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law at Emory University School of Law. She rejoined the Emory faculty in 2016 after a decade at the University of Virginia School of Law, where she was most recently the Hardy Cross Dillard Professor of Law. In fall 2022, she was the Hieken Visiting Professor in Patent Law at Harvard Law School and in 2025, she was the Herchel Smith Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge (UK).
Professor Bagley is a well-known and widely cited scholar on a variety of international intellectual property topics and is a foremost expert on international patent law issues. Professor Bagley served on both the National Academies Committee on Advancing Commercialization from the Federal Laboratories, and on the National Academies Committee on University Management of Intellectual Property: Lessons from a Generation of Experience, Research, and Dialogue. She also has served as a U.S. Department of Commerce Commercial Law Development Program advisor, and as a member of the U.S. DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) ELSI (Ethical, Legal, and Societal Issues) Team for the BRACE (Bio-Inspired Restoration of Aged Concrete Edifices) project. She is a member of the American Law Institute and the Scientific Advisory Board of the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, as well as the Innovation Board of the EU-funded Blue Remediomics project. In addition, she is a McDonald Distinguished Senior Fellow in Law and Religion at Emory Law, a Harvard Law School Berkman Klein Faculty Affiliate, and a member of the Board of the Global IP Alliance.
Professor Bagley has served as a consultant to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the UN Food and Agriculture Organization Secretariat for the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, and as an expert technical advisor to the African Union Commission in several World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) matters. She served for seven years as the Friend of the Chair in the WIPO Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore, and has also served as a member of the first Ad Hoc Technical Expert Group on Digital Sequence Information on Genetic Resources for the CBD and Nagoya Protocol. She is a co-director of the Harvard University Global Access in Action Program and has been an expert witness in several patent law disputes. Her scholarship focuses on comparative issues relating to patents and biotechnology, pharmaceuticals and access to medicines, traditional knowledge protection for indigenous peoples and local communities, technology transfer, and IP and social justice.
Professor Bagley has published numerous articles and book chapters, as well as three books with co-authors: Bagley, Okediji, and Erstling, International Patent Law & Policy (West Publishing 2013), Patent Law in Global Perspective (Okediji and Bagley eds., Oxford University Press 2014), and Advanced Introduction to International Patent Law (Margo A. Bagley & Rochelle Dreyfuss, Elgar Press, 2025). At Emory, her courses include domestic and international patent law, trademark law, and international intellectual property. She also co-developed the award-winning TI:GER® program (Technological Innovation Generating Economic Results), an innovative educational venture with the Georgia Institute of Technology, which brings together graduate students in law, business, and engineering to learn the process of transforming promising research into commercially viable projects.
Professor Bagley received her JD in 1996 from Emory, where she was a Robert W. Woodruff Fellow, an editor of the Emory Law Journal, and elected to Order of the Coif. She is a member of the Georgia bar and is registered to practice before the US Patent and Trademark Office. Bagley worked as an associate with Smith, Gambrell & Russell, LLP and Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner, LLP before joining the Emory faculty in 1999. She was a visiting professor at Washington & Lee University School of Law in fall 2001 and at the University of Virginia School of Law in fall 2005, after which she joined the University of Virginia faculty in 2006. Since 2012, she has been a faculty lecturer with the Munich Intellectual Property Law Center at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, and also has taught International Patent Law and related courses in China, Cuba, Israel, Singapore, and with the Emory Advancing Health Innovations in Africa (AHIA) program.
A chemical engineer with a B.S.Ch.E. degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Professor Bagley worked in industry (with the Procter & Gamble Company and the Coca Cola Company) for several years before attending law school and is a co-inventor on three utility patents: one for reduced fat peanut butter and two relating to bedding technology. Professor Bagley also completed research internships at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, AT&T Bell Laboratories, and the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center.