Chris Morten is a lawyer who currently teaches at Columbia Law School. He is the director of Columbia’s Science, Health & Information Clinic (SHIC).
Chris’s clinical work, research, and writing focus on access to knowledge, with particular emphasis on science, technology, and health justice. Much of his work seeks to expand access to medicines and access to information about medicines.
Before coming to Columbia Law in 2021, Chris worked at New York University School of Law, as the Deputy Director and Clinical Teaching Fellow of NYU’s Technology Law and Policy Clinic. He was also a Fellow at NYU’s Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy. Before that, Chris worked at Yale Law School, where he was Staff Attorney and Research Scholar in Law at the Collaboration for Research Integrity and Transparency and Supervising Attorney and Clinical Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School’s Media Freedom & Information Access Clinic. Chris remains a Visiting Fellow of the Global Health Justice Partnership and an Affiliated Fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School.
Before beginning his law teaching career in 2018, Chris worked as a litigation associate and science advisor at Goodwin Procter L.L.P. and as a patent agent at Baker Botts L.L.P. He clerked for the Honorable Timothy B. Dyk of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit from 2015 to 2016.
Chris received his J.D., magna cum laude and Order of the Coif, from New York University, a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a B.A. in chemistry, summa cum laude, from Columbia University. In his graduate research in the Jamison Group at MIT, Chris investigated the biomimetic synthesis of a class of natural products known as the ladder polyethers.
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