
College Contact Details
Room: Room 6, Strathaird
Tel: 01223 332179
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College Teaching Officer (Lucy Cavendish College)
Interests
Poorna’s research sits at the intersection of private law with intellectual property law. Her particular interests include property law, property theory, intellectual property law and generally the law relating to intangibles.
Research centres and interest groups
CV / Biography
Before taking up her current role, Poorna was a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford, a JRF at the Queen’s College, Oxford, and an academic member at the Oxford Intellectual Property Research Centre. As a postdoctoral fellow at Oxford, she worked on the conceptual and doctrinal analogies that can be drawn from tangible property law, such as land law and personal property law, into copyright law to examine the extent to which this can assist copyright balance. A monograph drawn from this research entitled Copyright as Personal Property was published by Oxford University Press in 2025. Poorna been a visiting scholar at Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia at Melbourne Law School, and E W Barker Centre for Law and Business at the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore, Project on the Foundations of Private Law at Harvard Law School and Centre for Private Law at Hong Kong University.
Her doctoral thesis was on implied licences in copyright law, where she analysed and applied principles of contract law to copyright law to develop a robust and predictive methodology for implying copyright licences. Her first monograph entitled Implied Licences in Copyright Law was published by Oxford University Press. Poorna's teaching interests extend to Land Law and Tort Law, although she has previously taught Contract Law and Equity. In 2026 she was elected the Vice-President of Lucy Cavendish College.
Poorna obtained her undergraduate law degree at NLSIU, Bangalore, and an LLM from SOAS, University of London for which she was awarded the Felix Scholarship. Before embarking on her doctorate, Poorna practised intellectual property law for several years in Hong Kong and was a litigator in India.
Selected publications
Books
Copyright as Personal Property (Oxford University Press, 2025)
Implied Licences in Copyright Law (Oxford University Press, 2021)

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