Biography

Alina Boyte is a law professor who focuses her teaching, research, and scholarship on property, land use, and intellectual property laws and their relationship with sustainability and sustainable development. She graduated from the University of London, Cambridge University, and Stanford Law School, where she completed her dissertation on copyright law’s history and the influence technological development had on the law under the supervision of Paul Goldstein. She served as an assistant, associate, and professor of law at Mississippi College School of Law before joining the faculty of Richardson in August 2024. She will teach property, land use, and intellectual property law at Richardson. Professor Boyte’s research and scholarship focus on how property and intellectual property laws shape and influence sustainable development goals. She is particularly interested in how the global community, grassroots organizations, and businesses can create and use resources that lead to greater sustainability, ensuring future generations’ welfare as current and new resources are used and produced. Her current projects include an exploration of extrinsic and intrinsic motivators for human action and how they influence society’s mobility toward sustainability and sustainable development goals. Professor Boyte’s research interest is shaped by conversations she has had with colleagues in academia, students in her research classes, and social entrepreneurs she’s engaged with through her work with the Changemaker Institute, a public benefit corporation she founded in 2021.

Select Publications

• ‘The Motivation Paradox: Exploring Copyright’s Assumption about Creativity and the Allocation of Creative Resources,  10 TEX. A&M J. PROP. L. 327 (2024)
• The Social Value of Intellectual Property, 12 IP THEORY (2023)
• Progress as Impact: A Contemporary View of the Copyright and Patent Clause, 21 WAKE FOREST J. BUS. & INTELL. PROP. L. 1 (2020)
• The Conceits of Our Legal Imagination: Legal Fictions and the Concept of Deemed  Authorship, 17 N.Y.U. J. LEGIS. & PUB. POL’Y 707 (2014)
• Literary Property and Copyright, 10 NW. J. TECH. & INTELL. PROP. 531 (2012)
• Identifying “Truth” in American Public Discourse, 56 DUQUESNE L. REV. 105 (2018)
• Picking at Morals: Analytical Jurisprudence in the Age of Naturalized Ethics, 26 S. CAL. INTERDISC. L.J. 493 (2017)
• Legitimacy in International Dispute Resolution in the Age of Anti-Globalization, Nationalism, and Isolationism: How Geographical and Legal Cultural Diversity on the International Bench Can Promote Regional and International Cooperation, 3 INT’L. COMP. POL. & ETH. L. REV. 167 (2020)
• When Users Are Authors: Authorship in the Age of Digital Media, 12 VAND. J. ENT. & TECH. L. 853 (2010)
• The Author’s Rights in Literary and Artistic Works, 9 J. MARSHALL REV. INTELL. PROP. L. 453 (2009)
• The Social Contract and Authorship: Allocating Entitlements in the Copyright System, 19 FORDHAM INTELL. PROP. MEDIA & ENT. L.J. 413 (2009)
• Authors and Readers: Conceptualizing Authorship in Copyright Law, 30 HASTINGS COMM. & ENT. L. J. 377 (2008)