One of the things that I love about working at the University of Virginia is that the scholars here are engaged in the world. The things UVA professors (and students!) study, teach, and write about contribute to both the cutting edge academic discourse and the broader public conversation. Some of the works of scholarship by UVA professors to gain wide attention have been about the life and work of particular authors and historic figures, like William Faulkner or, as you may have stumbled across in a review in the recent issue of the New Yorker, Lord Byron.

As the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit explained in the landmark case Bill Graham Archives v. Darling Kindersley:

While there are no categories of presumptively fair use, courts have frequently afforded fair use protection to the use of copyrighted material in biographies, recognizing such works as forms of historic scholarship, criticism, and comment that require incorporation of original source material for optimum treatment of their subjects.

In 2020 I spoke to BIO - the Biographers International Organization - about how fair use can enable them to enrich their books with quotations and illustrations that relate to their stories. We published a rough draft of that interview on The Taper as part of Fair Use Week that year:

Fair Use Week Day 5: Fair Use and Biography, A First Draft Interview

BIO later published the final version, which included contributions from my colleague professor Peter Jaszi.

You can watch a fair use workshop for biographers that Peter and I did for BIO here: