Roman Melnik
USC Gould School of Law

Roman Melnik is a solo patent law practitioner, with recognized expertise in counseling companies in connection with patent litigation, opinions of counsel and right of use analysis for accused infringers, enforcement analysis for patentees, Paragraph IV analysis for generic pharmaceutical companies under the Hatch-Waxman Act, and prior art searching.

Before starting his own practice, Melnik was a partner with Irell & Manella LLP, specializing in patent litigation and counseling. His patent cases have involved a wide array of technologies, including PVD, CVD, and wet techniques and tools for semiconductor substrate processing, the mathematics of magnetron design, pharmaceutical active ingredients and dosage forms, energy-recovery circuit design for storage media and plasma displays, construction of ultrasound medical devices, polymer chemistry, JPEG compression, traffic-control devices, and molecular biology.

Melnik graduated magna cum laude with an AB in Chemistry from Harvard University and received an MS in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley. He taught chemistry at Berkeley and Harvard and worked as a research chemist before earning a JD from Columbia Law School, where he was a senior editor of the Columbia Law Review and taught civil procedure. He then clerked for the Honorable Phyllis A. Kravitch, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.

FACULTY IN THE NEWS

Bloomberg Government
June 22, 2022
Re: Franita Tolson

Franita Tolson was interviewed about how federal lawsuits from North Carolina, Alabama, and Arkansas test the limits of the Voting Rights Act, the boundaries of state government authority, and the ability of voting rights groups to file racial gerrymandering cases. “These doctrines and approaches in these cases fundamentally reset the rules of the game,” she said. “In 2030 we will live in a completely different world than we lived in in 2020, and 2020 was not favorable to minority voters at all.”

RECENT SCHOLARSHIP

Robin Craig
March, 2022

"Saltwater Sovereignty: Tribal Marine Management Authority Along the Pacific Coast.” Online Environmental Law Workshop. University of Maryland School of Law, Baltimore, MD.

Daniel Klerman
March, 2022

“Comment on Choi, Erickson, & Pritchard, ‘Coalitions among Plaintiffs’ Attorneys in Securities Class Actions’,” Conference on Empirical Legal Studies, Virtual, Toronto, ON, Canada.

Robin Craig
March, 2022

“Who’s on First? The Mind-Blowing Attempt to Conceptualize Deference in the Midst of Decision Delays and Agency Repeals,” J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Environmental Law Symposium for the George Washington University School of Law, Virtual, Washington, D.C.