Prof. Mark Lemley Receives AALS Section on Scholarship Award for Mentoring

[My remarks from the AALS Section on Scholarship awards ceremony in San Francisco, January 10, 2025]

I’m honored and a bit humbled to have served as Prof. Mark Lemley’s lead nominator to recognize his mentorship of other scholars. Nine other IP professors joined this nomination.

Prof. Lemley’s achievements as a scholar are legendary and likely well-known to many section members. Prof. Lemley operates at a scale that few other scholars can match. For example, his works have been cited 45,000 times, making him one of the ten most cited legal scholars of all time. I imagine many of you in the room have cited him yourself.

Prof. Lemley is also one of the most prolific legal scholars of all time. Many section members aspire to publish one article a year. Prof. Lemley produces more like 10X that. No one has been able to reverse engineer the secrets of his productivity. It’s prompted many “jokes” in our community (more precisely, a mix of admiration and envy) that Prof. Lemley must have clones or robots to achieve his astonishing level of productivity.

I mention the scale of Prof. Lemley’s scholarly output because that word—scale—also applies to his mentorship of other people’s scholarly work. His quantitative achievements as a scholarly mentor are at a scale that defies logic. I’ll mention three numerical measures of Prof. Lemley’s mentorship.

First measure: Prof. Lemley has helped over 50 former students and fellows become law professors plus many other non-students or fellows, including me. Prof. Lemley’s numbers reflect his impressive track record of spotting and nurturing future academics. Several of his nominators specifically mentioned how Prof. Lemley recognized their potential as students (sometimes before they even had considered an academic career), encouraged them to pursue academia, and successfully navigated them through the daunting process.

Second measure: Like many professors, Prof. Lemley generously comments on other people’s drafts. Unlike other professors, he provides feedback at a staggering scale. He has been mentioned twice as many times in law review articles’ star footnotes than the next closest person—an amazing 170 times.

Third measure: Prof. Lemley co-authors with other scholars a lot—over co-authored 150 papers. Prof. Lemley is such a frequent co-author that community members often joke about having a “Lemley Number” analogous to the Erdős Number. While some co-authors are established big names, Prof. Lemley routinely uses the co-authorship process as his way of mentoring and developing emerging scholars and boosting their credentials.

The scale of Prof. Lemley’s mentorship efforts is bigger than my brain can compute. It feels like no one can do that much mentoring; and surely someone so deeply invested in mentoring shouldn’t have enough time to be one of the community’s most prolific authors as well. Based solely on his individual efforts as a mentor, Prof. Lemley deserves section recognition.

However, Prof. Lemley’s true impact is better measured by the cumulative effects of his work. Prof. Lemley routinely motivates the people he benefits to “pay it forward” and help others like Prof. Lemley helped them. Prof. Lemley’s mentorship-at-scale acts like a force multiplier: his efforts inspire scholars to “pay it forward,” and their acts further inspire other community members to adopt that ethos. Collectively, it’s generated wonderful scholarly norms in Prof. Lemley’s communities, all modeled on Prof. Lemley’s mentorship.

Drafting these remarks, I kept thinking of the Archimedes principle, which says “Give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will move the world.” I offer a Lemley corollary to this principle: with a generous mentor who dispenses guidance and kindness at scale, we can lift up entire scholarly communities.

For helping hundreds of individual mentees and for building great mentoring norms among scholarly communities, Prof. Lemley richly deserves recognition from this section. I extend to him my personal congratulations and my ongoing gratitude for his mentorship.

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A few photos from the awards ceremony: