Richard Stern:
CLASS OF 1949
Bronx High School of ScienceClass of 1949
Bronx, NY
Yale University - LawClass of 1959
New haven, CT
Columbia CollegeClass of 1953
New york, NY
Bronx Public School 97Class of 1945
Bronx, NY
Richard's Story
Life
After I left BHSS I attended Columbia for five years, graduating '53 (AB) and '54 (BSEE). I then attended Yale LS (interrupted by a US Army stint) graduating 1959, and then went to DC.
I spent the next 20 years on and off in the US Govt.
I worked in the Dept. of Justice Antitrust Div. ("ATD") (mostly doing patent antitrust and Sup.Ct. patent appeals) with these interruptions: as law clerk for Sup.Ct. Justice Byron White; in FTC, enforcing merger and acquisition laws and unfair trade practice laws agsinst trading stamp companies; in Dept. of Commerce, ineffectively trying to stem the adverse US balance of payments; and short stint as law professor at U. of Minn.
When I left the ATD at the end of the 70s, antitrust enforcement fell to zero because of changes in administration, so I reverted to being a patent lawyer, which I have mostly done ever since. I am with a law firm in DC (Kellogg Huber Hansen Todd Evans, which is mostly a litigation boutique) where I mostly do patent infringement cases, occasionally patent applications. I do not plan to retire because my theory is that people who retire are likely to expire shortly after that.
While at the ATD I became chief of its Patent Section and then Intellectual Prop. Section. Mainly, I worked on three types of thing: (1) Enforce Sherman Antitrust Act against restrictive licensing arrangements such as drug company licensing programs aimed at preventing sale of patented drug chemicals to generic drug houses (who would likely cut prices - a form of conduct of which ATD approved). (2) Federal legislation, usually patent-related. (3) Supreme Court appeals of patent office refusals to issue computer-program related patents, which the US patent appeals court regularly overturned and the S. Ct. then reinstated.
I used to write a lot of law review articles, mostly on antitrust or computer-software law, but now every few months I write a legal column ("MicroLaw") for an IEEE Computer Soc. magazine (IEEE Micro).
I am afraid my personal life is rather uninteresting at present, so I don't have much to say about it.
The best way for anyone to get in touch with me is by email. This site seems to frown on directly listing your eml but try contacting me by using rstern at computer dot org. If you want to find my Website at Geo. Wash. U. L.S. try Googling me as "Professor Richard H. Stern" and that should work. Once you are viewing any part of my Website at GW (for my course, Computer Law 484), you can get to the rest of it via links. The site also has a page with links to articles and columns--mostly on computer software legal issues.
I still teach (computer law), as an adjunct professor at Geo. Wash. U. Law School. My particular field of interest is software related patents and business method patents. I am doing a clinical law project on this right now (it's a multi-year project) on a business method patent application looking toward a test case. If you're interested in it, you can read about it by Googling "clinical project" and "business method" - there's a link there to an animation illustrating how the invention works. (Image Google works too.) On refl...Expand for more
ection, it has a weird scientist quality. I mean a BHSS "scientist" quality.
Workplace
See main bio (Life) for summary. Or else Google my name and "bio."
Military
I really didn't like being in the Army, and the Army must have had a pretty poor opinion of me as a totally worthless specimen of a soldier, although I managed to escape from it eventually with an Honorable Discharge. (My buddy Dick O., whom some of you knew, didn't do as well. He got so PO'd at the Army after a while that he just up and disappeared one day, changed his name, and sank out of sight.)
The Army was kind of screwed up administratively when I entered it, so I was successively assigned to the 82nd and 101st Airbornes, involuntarily and pointlessly. I spent about a year in Arizona at Fort Huachuca. Arizona wasn't bad but Huachuca was the pits. It was Mr Levenson 24/7 and (like him) the management at Fort Huachuca really had no use for (snort!) "scientists." I was in a so-called scientist unit, and the powers that be (or then were) believed that digging ditches and cleaning grease traps was the best thing to do with people with that military occupational specialty. Then I went to Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, which was a lot better because I actually learned something useful in its Ordnance Corp.'s Ballistic Research Lab (located inside the corpse of ENIAC!). (ENIAC's vacuum tubes were burned out; it was dead but its air conditioning was not. Great in those days before a/c was common.)
I got several things out of being in the Army, however. First, I got the GI Bill because I went in at the tail end of the Korean War just before the GI Bill stopped for a number of years. That was a big help getting me through law school because I didn't have much money.
Second, I learned how to design transistor circuits at Aberdeen PG's BRL. That was a subject they didn't teach of Columbia Eng'g School - they thought vacuum tubes would last forever. Learning about transistors provided me with gainful employment while in law school - at $3/hr when the going wage generally was $1/hr. Actually, $3 was more than I made an hour in the Justice Dept. when I started working there in 1959 after law school. Starting EE's got paid more than starting lawyers in those days.
Third, I figured out that the same kind of people running the army would likely be the kind of people running a centrally planned society, if the US ever seriously emulated the Labor Gov't in the UK of those days. So, since then I have been very suspicious of gov't central planning and its advocates. (That was reinforced by my experience working in an agency of the Commerce Department at the end of the 1960s - the agency's planners futilely tried to manage direct foreign investment to "improve" the US balance of payments. Think of Pogo and "We have met the enemy and it is us." That was my govt. agency.)
Anyhow, that's my un-illustrious military career. It was a highly educational experience, but I wouldn't recommend it to any of you out there thinking of enlisting at your present advanced age and state of decrepitude. The education is valuable but much too expensive.
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