Law professor Sonia Katyal argues that in contemporary society, the production of popular culture rests on the pervasive presence of corporate sponsorship throughout many aspects of public and private life; less familiar, and even more important, are the ways in which our legal system has allowed advertising to become a large part of our everyday language. Katyal’s book project, Anti-Branding, investigates how artists transform – and successfully subvert – the power of advertising, and how the law has both enabled and silenced their work.
Sonia Katyal is Associate Professor of Law at Fordham Law School, where she specializes in intellectual property and art law. Her book Property Outlaws was published by Yale University Press in 2010. She is the author of “Semiotic Disobedience” in the Washington University Law Quarterly in 2006 and also received a Dukeminier Award (for the best legal scholarship on sexual orientation) for her paper “Exporting Identity,” published in the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism in 2001. She serves on the Board of Advisors for the annual selection of Good Legal Writing for the Green Bag, and was previously a Board Member of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York (2003-2006).