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

NPR
January 4, 2022
Re: Franita Tolson

Franita Tolson was interviewed about where election-denying candidates are running to control voting. "The reasons why Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 election failed is because there were state officials who refused to substantiate his claims of fraud," she said.

RECENT SCHOLARSHIP

D. Daniel Sokol
November, 2021

D. Daniel Sokol posted an Op-ed to the National Post titled “Competition law reforms not needed to meet the challenges of Big Tech,” November 17, 2021.

Robin Craig
November, 2021

"Environmental Law, Disrupted by COVID-19" (with Rebecca Bratspies, Vanessa Casado Perez, Lissa Griffin, Keith Hirokawa, Sarah Krakoff, Katrina Kuh, Jessica Owley, Melissa Powers, Shannon Roesler, Jonathan Rosenbloom, J.B. Ruhl, Erin Ryan, & David Takacs). In Environmental Law, Disrupted, edited by K. Hirokawa & J. Owley. Washington, D.C.: Environmental Law Institute, 2021.

Robert K. Rasmussen
November, 2021

“COVID-19 Debt and Bankruptcy Infrastructure,” Yale Law Journal Forum 131 (2021): 337.