Chinwe Ohanele

Chinwe Ohanele is an Assistant Professor of Law, Legal Practice at the University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law, where she teaches Copyright Law, The Legal Profession, and the Global Lawyering Skills sequence. She joined the faculty in 2025. Her scholarship examines how copyright and intellectual property systems shape who creates, who shares, and who benefits from creative and inventive work, with particular attention to historically marginalized communities in the United States and the Global South.

Her article, Copyright as Safe Passage: Securing the Corridor Between Creation and the World, is forthcoming in the Arizona State Sports and Entertainment Law Journal. The article argues that copyright protects not only the incentive to create but also the assurance that a work will travel safely once its author releases it, and it considers what that assurance requires in the age of generative AI. She will present this work at the Mosaic IP Law and Policy Roundtable at UC Irvine School of Law, and in 2027 she will present it at the Works in Progress IP Colloquium at UNLV and at the National People of Color Legal Scholarship Conference at Seattle University School of Law. Her current project, Closing the Inventor Gap: Inclusive IP Education and the Knowledge Economy, examines how IP education can widen participation in innovation.

In 2026, Professor Ohanele received the Hether C. Macfarlane Teaching Innovation Award, given each year to a McGeorge faculty member who demonstrates significant positive changes, effectiveness, or innovation in teaching. Before her current appointment, she was a Visiting Professor at McGeorge and an Adjunct Professor at the USC Gould School of Law, where she taught Contract Drafting Analysis and Negotiations.

Professor Ohanele is Senior Program Manager at the Michelson Institute for Intellectual Property, where she built and developed the IP Literacy Project, a K–12 intellectual property curriculum now implemented across multiple states. At the Institute, she also championed the passage of California Senate Resolution 106, which established October as IP Awareness Month in California, and launched a legal fellowship on technology-transfer infrastructure within the HBCU research ecosystem. She has taught, moderated, and presented at national and international forums, including the Afreximbank Creative Africa Nexus, the Intra-African Trade Fair, the Global IP Alliance, the American Bar Association, and the National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship. Earlier in her career, she practiced employment law then ran a small business and IP practice in California. She has also advised on IP policy and content licensing for creative industries in the United States and Nigeria.

She serves on the boards of the United States Intellectual Property Alliance, the California Intellectual Property Alliance, the Entrepreneurship Funders Network, and the Pro Bono Advisory Council. She is admitted to practice in California, New York, and New Jersey. Professor Ohanele earned her JD from Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, and her BS in economics and philosophy from the University of the Pacific.