Christopher Morten
Christopher Morten is an expert on technology, health, information, and “intellectual property” law. He is the founding director of the Science, Health, and Information Clinic.
In his clinical work, Morten seeks to serve the public interest by fighting for—and winning—access to scientific, technical, and medical knowledge and the benefits that flow from that knowledge. The Science, Health & Information Clinic works to democratize, protect, and expand access to health care, and it works to democratize, protect, and expand access to information vital to health and human flourishing.
Morten’s scholarship grows out of his clinical work. It considers how law and policy shape the ways that knowledge flows through our economy and society and how law and policy influence how new technologies are invented, validated, manufactured, distributed, and used. Some of his recent publications describe the legal authority of the Food & Drug Administration and other federal regulators to publicize massive troves of valuable scientific and technological information they currently keep secret; analyze the U.S. government’s power to use privately patented technologies in the public interest; and extract hard-earned lessons for governance of social media data and social media companies from decades of management of sensitive, valuable medical data.
Morten joined the NYU Law faculty as an Associate Professor of Law in 2025. From 2021 to 2025, he was an Associate Clinical Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. Before that, he was the deputy director of the Technology Law and Policy Clinic at NYU Law, a fellow at NYU’s Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy, a supervising attorney and clinical lecturer in Yale Law School’s Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic, and the staff attorney at Yale’s Collaboration for Research Integrity and Transparency. Before beginning his teaching career, Morten worked as a litigation associate and science adviser at Goodwin Procter and as a patent agent at Baker Botts. He also clerked for Judge Timothy B. Dyk of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
