19th November, 2023
By Emmanuel Ogebe
Ruth Gana-Okediji, a Nigerian American professor in Harvard University Law School, has been inducted into the American Academy of Science and Letters.
In a ceremony recently at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C, Okediji was honoured along with Orlando Patterson, the longest serving African American professor at Harvard and eight others. Patterson had been a professor for 52 years.
Others honoured are Robert George of Princeton (politics), Jonathan Haidt of NYU (psychology), Svetlana Jitomirskaya of UC-Berkeley (Mathematics), Steven Koonin of NYU (Physics), Anna Krylov of USC (Chemistry), Jon Levenson of Harvard (Jewish studies), Josaih Ober of Stanford (Classics) and Candace Vogler of University of Chicago (Philosophy).
The induction on 8 November was conducted by Donald W. Landry, President of the Academy and Sanjeev R. Kulkarni, the board chairman. All the inductees were awarded the 2023 Barry Prizes
for distinguished intellectual achievements.
Ruth Gana-Okediji is an intellectual property expert. Harvard Law School in an announcement of the award described her as a transformative legal scholar.
“Ruth Okediji’s scholarship has helped nations around the world grasp the revolutionary implications of a simple but powerful notion: that an idea can be someone’s property,” said the academy in its official citation.
“Her signal contributions to the development of intellectual property rights in international legal systems has empowered human flourishing globally by protecting people’s right to own not only the work of their hands, but the work of their minds. The academy honours Dr. Okediji’s distinguished contributions to humanity’s development of just laws that facilitate fair transactions so all may prosper.”
During her distinguished career, Okediji has served as a policy adviser to inter-governmental organisations, regional economic communities, and national governments on various matters related to IP, competition law, innovation policy, and human welfare.
She has written extensively on these topics and her scholarship has influenced government policies and national strategies for implementing the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement) and other global IP treaties in Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America.
Her most recent book, “Copyright Law in an Age of Limitations and Exceptions,” was published in 2017, by Cambridge University Press.
Okediji served as the chief technical expert and lead negotiator for the Delegation of Nigeria to the 2013 WIPO Diplomatic Conference to Conclude a Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works by Visually Impaired Persons and Persons with Print Disabilities (Marrakesh VIP Treaty). In 2015, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appointed her to the 2015-2016 High Level Panel on Access to Medicines.
Okediji joined the Harvard Law Faculty as a tenured law professor and co-director of the Berkman Klein Center in 2017.
At Harvard Law School, she founded and serves as faculty director of the Program on Biblical Law and Christian Legal Studies.
She was recently appointed the Oppenheimer Faculty Director of the Center for African Studies at Harvard University.”
Ruth’s husband Prof Okediji witnessed the induction, as well as her mother, siblings Timothy and Grace Gana, international human rights lawyer and fellow UniJos Law Faculty alumnus Emmanuel Ogebe.
Ruth is the daughter of Prof Aaron Gana who taught at ABU and UniJos and was Vice Chancellor of Bingham University in Abuja.