As soon as Kevin Greene got up to speak, he noticed people walking out. Greene was in Washington D.C., about to begin his presentation on Black music, copyright law, and social justice at the annual conference for the Association of American Law Schools in the mid-2000s, when he saw a group of older IP scholars fleeing the conference room.
“I’ll never forget it. They just stood up and walked out, like they had something better to do,” says Greene, a professor at Los Angeles’ Southwestern Law School. “I was considered the odd duck in intellectual property.”
In the nearly two decades since then, Greene has gone from being a little-known, occasionally ostracized member of his field to one of the most sought-after scholarly voices on the music industry’s longstanding and ongoing racial inequities.
