About
Professor Lars S. Smith holds the Samuel J. Stallings Chair in Law at the University of Louisville's Louis D. Brandeis School of Law. He teaches in the areas of intellectual property, business and commercial law. His courses include Intellectual Property Survey, Trademark Law, Business Planning, Law and Economics, Property, and Secured Transactions. Professor Smith is particularly interested in helping students build practice skills, and so incorporates various practice based exercises in his Trademark Law and Business Planning courses.
In 2012 Professor Smith received the University of Louisville Distinguished Faculty Award in Teaching. In 2011, Professor Smith received a Fulbright Scholarship Award to teach at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law in Wuhan, China, where he taught Chinese Masters of Law students about U.S. intellectual property law. Professor Smith is the faculty advisor to the Law School's Entrepreneurship Clinic, and was the initial Interim Director to the law school's first law clinic.
Professor Smith's scholarship focuses on issues related to intellectual property, commercial law and technology. Smith's article, "Trade Distinctiveness: Solving Scalia's Tertium Quid Trade Dress Conundrum," was selected as one of the leading intellectual property articles by the Intellectual Property Law Review in 2006. His other work has focused on the challenge of applying existing intellectual property legal structures on new technologies. Professor Smith is currently working on issues of intellectual property and cloud computing, as well as Commerce Clause limitations on intellectual property legislation. In his article "RFID and Other Embedded Technologies: Who Owns the Data?", Smith looked at the emerging tracking technology of radio frequency identification, and what property rights exist in automatically generated data contained on RFID chips. In a follow-up article, "RFID in the Supply Chain: Panacea or Pandora's Box?", co-authored with Dr. Brian L. Dos Santos, the Frazier Family Professor of Computer Information Systems, Smith and Dos Santos explored the effect of these current legal rules on the use of radio frequency identification in the product supply chain. Professor Smith's book, "Mastering Trademark and Unfair Competition Law," co-written with Professor Llewellyn Gibbons from the University of Toledo, was published by Carolina Academic Press in 2013 with a second edition published in 2024.
Prior to joining the Faculty at University of Louisville, Professor Smith worked as a corporate and intellectual property lawyer in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.
