Ryan Whalen’s research takes a data-driven approach to understanding the law and legal systems, with a particular focus on intellectual property law and innovation policy. This approach unites traditional doctrinal analyses with empirical techniques drawn from diverse fields including machine learning, natural language processing, network analysis, and data science.

His work has appeared in a wide variety of journals including the University of Chicago Law Review, Research Policy, Science & Public Policy, the Northwestern University Law Review, the Yale Law Journal Forum, the Michigan State Law Review, and the Journal of the Patent and Trademark Office Society.

Ryan Whalen holds a BA(hons) from Saint Mary’s University (Canada), an MA from National Chengchi University (Taiwan), a JD from the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, and a PhD from Northwestern University. While at Northwestern, Ryan served as the editor-in-chief of the Northwestern University Law Review. Prior to joining HKU Ryan served on the faculties at the National University of Singapore and Dalhousie University, and as a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago and the University of Glasgow.

• Diversity, Networks, and Innovation: A Text Analytic Approach to Measuring Expertise Diversity, Network Science (with Alina Lungeanu, Y. Jasmine Wu, Leslie DeChurch, and Noshir Contractor) (2023).

• Quantitative Methods in Comparative Law, in Elgar Encyclopedia of Comparative Law (Jaakko Husa, Jans Smits, Catherine Valcke eds.) (2023).

• The Ghost in the Patent System: An Empirical Study of Patent Law’s Elusive “Ordinary Artisan,” Iowa Law Review (2022) (with Laura Pedraza-Fariña).

• How Many Latours is Too Many?: Measuring Brand Congestion in Bordeaux Wine, Journal of Wine Economics (2021) (with Christopher Buccafusco & Jonathan S. Masur).

• Computational Legal Studies: The Promise and Challenge of Data-Driven Research (editor), Edward Elgar (2020).

• A Network Theory of Patentability, 87 University of Chicago Law Review 63, (2020) (with Laura Pedraza-Fariña).

• Patent Similarity Data and Innovation Metrics, 17 Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 3, (2020) (with Noshir Contractor, Leslie DeChurch, and Alina Lungeanu).

• Semantically-Based Patent Thicket Identification, 49 Research Policy 2, (2020) (with Mateusz Gątkowski, Marek Dietl, Lukasz Skrok, and Katharine Rockett).

• Boundary Spanning Innovation and the Patent System: Interdisciplinary Challenges for a Specialized Examination System, 47 Research Policy 1334, (2018).

• Legal Networks: The Promises and Challenges of Legal Network Analyses, 2016 Michigan State Law Review 539 (2016).