Anjali Vats

Anjali Vats is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law with a secondary appointment in the Department of Communication. Her work bridges legal scholarship with critical race theory, focusing on the intersection of intellectual property law and racial justice. She has established herself as a leading voice in Critical Race Intellectual Property scholarship.

Professor Vats's research centers on the racial dimensions of intellectual property law, examining how copyright, trademark, and patent systems perpetuate racial hierarchies and white supremacy. Her scholarship explores the whiteness of intellectual property frameworks, the erasure of Black intellectual labor, and the potential of critical race theory as a methodology for intellectual property research. She has developed the field of Critical Race Intellectual Property (CRT-IP), which analyzes how intellectual property law constructs racial categories and reinforces racial inequality in the United States and globally.

Her publication record reveals a clear trajectory of developing Critical Race Intellectual Property as a distinct scholarly field. Beginning with foundational works like 'Critical Race IP' (2018) and 'The Color of Creatorship' (2020), she has systematically examined how intellectual property law shapes racial categories and citizenship. Her more recent work expands into digital spaces, examining racial dynamics in cyberlaw and addressing geopolitical dimensions of intellectual property through a critical race lens. The 2024 publications on Chinese and Russian cybercrime in global racial orders and knowledge anti-imperialism demonstrate the continued evolution of her scholarship into transnational and decolonial frameworks.

Professor Vats's research has been published in leading law journals including the Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal, University of Pittsburgh Law Review, IDEA: The IP Law Review, and the LSU Journal for Social Justice & Policy. Her work has been featured in edited volumes from prestigious publishers including Stanford University Press, Oxford University Press, and the University of California Press. Her scholarship has been cited in legal discourse on race and intellectual property, with particular attention to how copyright frameworks erase Black intellectual contributions while centering white creators.

Her collaborative work, particularly with Deidre A. Keller, has been instrumental in establishing Critical Race Intellectual Property as a viable scholarly methodology. The co-authored publications demonstrate a sustained intellectual partnership focused on developing transdisciplinary methods to address the 'unbearable whiteness' of intellectual property law. Her more recent collaboration with Sheila I. Velez Martinez on 'Knowledge Anti-Imperialism in a Propertied World' signals an expansion of her scholarly interests into anti-imperial frameworks for analyzing intellectual property systems.