Robert W. Gomulkiewicz is the Judson Falknor Endowed Professor of Law and was the founding Director of the Intellectual Property Law & Policy Graduate Program.
Professor Gomulkiewicz’s scholarship focuses on intellectual property licensing and legal protection for software. His work explores the intersection between contracts and intellectual property in the creation and distribution of technology. His publications include both a treatise and a teaching textbook on intellectual property licensing, a teaching textbook on legal protection for software and numerous articles on software licensing and open-source software. He is also the author of the Simple Public License (SimPL) which is a plain language rendering of the venerable GNU General Public License. In 2018 he was a Herchel Smith Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge, in 2014 a Senior Engelberg Fellow at New York University School of Law and in 2008–09 a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford.
Prior to joining the faculty, he was an Associate General Counsel at Microsoft where he led the group of lawyers providing legal counsel for development of Microsoft's major systems software, desktop applications and developer tools software (including Windows and Office). He also served as Chair of the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA) working group of the Business Software Alliance. He joined Microsoft from the law firm of Preston, Gates & Ellis (now K&L Gates) where he represented developers and users of software and information products. While at Preston, Gates & Ellis, he worked on the Apple v. Microsoft case.