The Centre for Intellectual Property Policy and Management is pleased to announce the acquisition of the private collection of grey literature, journals and books belonging to Stephen Saxby, formerly Professor of IT Law and Public Policy at Southampton University (1977-2016).

Professor Saxby has a long history in the field, and was the first person in the UK to introduce an undergraduate LLB in information technology and computer law at Southampton in 1980. As a pioneer of this new discipline in the early 1980s, Professor Saxby also taught Computer Law and Comparative Constitutional Law at Arizona State University. After this in 1985, as founding editor, he launched Computer Law and Security Report and remained in the same role for 33 years including continuing to work as editor after its rebranding in 2010 as Computer Law and Security Review – The International Journal of Technology Law and Practice. Professor Saxby also served as editor of Sweet and Maxwell’s Encyclopaedia of Information Technology Law from 1990 until 2018.

Professor Dinusha Mendis, Director of the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy and Management, says “We are absolutely delighted to have acquired this unique and valuable law collection from Professor Sabxy. It is international and multilingual in nature, and spans from the 1970s to the 2010s – beginning at the very dawn of the personal computer age and extending well beyond the advent of the world wide web in 1994. Focussing on the many legal developments that ensued in the fields of intellectual property, data protection, cryptography and computer security, we are particularly delighted to have acquired this truly unique collection which sits alongside comparable historical collections of computer law that reside at the Oxford Internet Institute and the University of Edinburgh”.