He completed his Ph.D. in English at UC Berkeley, and his J.D at Yale. His research on the history of copyright law includes “Tom Jones and the Economies of Copyright,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 9 (1997): 429-44; and “Copyright, Originality, and the Public Domain in Eighteenth-Century England” in Reginald McGinnis, ed., Originality and Intellectual Property in the French and English Enlightenment (Routledge 2008). He also writes on the history of English common law and English literary history.