Fashion Law Institute - Fashion Company Profile

Company Profile

A nonprofit teaching center carries no shop box. The short filing below - the founding, the founder and the advisory board - is kept on this single page beside the current snapshot; courses and events are on the institute's own site, linked above.

The founder is named twice in the historical record, and the emphasis is fair: the Fashion Law Institute's founder and academic director is Professor Susan Scafidi, who teaches at Fordham Law School. Professor Scafidi, who pioneered the study of fashion law, founded the Institute and serves as its academic director; she created the first Fashion Law course and is internationally recognized for her expertise and for defining the field. When a single scholar creates the first course, founds the first center and is credited with defining the discipline, the profile of the institution and the biography of the founder are the same story told from two ends.

For the field the Institute defined, explained topic by topic — trademarks, copyright, design patents, counterfeiting, licensing and the legal side of running a fashion business — see our Fashion Law & Intellectual Property Guide.

A Nonprofit Teaching Center and Its Board

The Institute's legal form matches its mission: the Fashion Law Institute is a nonprofit organization recognized as a tax-exempt educational organization under Section 501(c) of the Internal Revenue Code. It is, in other words, a teaching and research body rather than a law firm - a distinction this page keeps clear, because readers who arrive here looking for a lawyer need the neighbouring directory pages instead. In addition, the Institute is supported by an advisory board including distinguished members of the fashion industry and the bar - the two professions the field joins, seated on one board.

That joining is the institute's whole idea, and the historical record's brevity still conveys it. Fashion's legal questions are unanswerable without fashion knowledge - what a silhouette is worth, how a season's calendar constrains a dispute, why a trademark matters more than a patent in this trade - and its business questions are unanswerable without law. A center inside a law school, backed by a designer and the industry's own council, staffed by the professor who defined the field: the filing describes an institution built at exactly the crossing it studies. The historical record closes with a piece of advice this rebuild happily preserves verbatim in spirit: always follow the law.