Dear IBL Center Community,

I am delighted to announce that I'm passing the reins of the Iowa Innovation, Business & Law Center to its next Director, Joe Yockey. It's been a tremendous twelve years, and it's time for the next Director to take the helm.

The IBL Center was created in 2007 to produce an event series that brings judges, agency officials, scholars, practitioners, and others to campus to discuss and debate current issues in corporate and securities law, antitrust, intellectual property, and related areas. The Center's activities are funded by the David M. Hellwege fund, supplemented by a few additional donations.

Since I first started directing it, the Center has hosted countless speakers and organized more events than I can remember, at times 6 or 7 a semester. Some of my favorites are:

• Hank Greeley's visit in 2014, co-sponsored with the Carver College of Medicine, during which he gave a talk at the Law School on de-extinction and another at the Medical School on genetic engineering and the future of babies.
• The 2016 IBL Colloquium course, in which students read and discussed a scholarly work in class, then attended the author's talk (being prepared with lots of good questions).
• The “Administering Patent Law” symposium with the Iowa Law Review in 2018, which brought together administrative and patent law scholars right at the dawn of the Supreme Court's deep focus on administrative law and the Patent Office.
• Our series on "Transportation and the Law," which subsequently became an Iowa Law Review symposium organized by Greg Shill.
• Rishab Nithyanand explaining in 2019 how everything we do online is tracked, collected, and used to market to us.
• The summer and fall 2020 speaker series that we ran online at a time when pretty much all gatherings and travel had completely stopped, one on Innovation & COVID-19 and the other entitled "Examining Institutional Structures: Race, Business, & Law."
• Our fall 2022 speaker series entitled “From Antiquities to Warhol: Exploring the Intersection of Art and Law,” held around the time the Supreme Court was deciding the Goldsmith/Warhol copyright fair use case.

Throughout it all, whether organizing speaker series myself or supporting the work of others in developing their own projects, my goal has always been to stay at the cutting edge of current issues, such as through our spring 2020 series "Innovations in the Business of Lawyering" (which pivoted to online talks after March 2020). It was a lot of work, but also a lot of fun to learn about some of these topics and engage with people across the university and beyond in so many different domains.

And of course, I could not have done any of this without the support of our IBL Center administrative assistants, especially Sara Clark and Leslie Gannon, or the faculty who proposed and organized some of our major events, such as the set of symposia and partnerships with journals at Harvard and Yale organized by Mihailis Diamantis, Joe Yockey, and Diane Dick, and the workshops organized by Megan Graham and Anya Prince over the past three years.

But there is much more to come for the Center. I'm excited to announce that the next Director will be Joe Yockey, the F. Arnold Daum Chair in Corporate Law. Professor Yockey has previously served as both President of the University Faculty Senate and the college's Associate Dean for Research and Professional Development. He is well poised to lead the Center into the future.

It's been a terrific 12 years, and I'm looking forward to seeing what kind of amazing events its new Director produces!

Jason Rantanen
Hammer-Boyd Chair in Law
Associate Dean for Faculty