Jessica Christine Lai is a New Zealand academic, and is a full professor at Victoria University of Wellington, specialising in the interaction of intellectual property rights and indigenous knowledge.

Lai is trained as a chemist, having completed a Master of Science in 2009 in chemistry with a thesis titled The Use of Nanostructured Calcium Silicate in Solar Cells at the Victoria University of Wellington.^[1] Lai completed her Doctor of Law in 2013 at the University of Lucerne, where she also conducted postdoctoral research.^[2][3] Lai was awarded a Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship to work at the Max-Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Munich.^[3] Lai then returned to New Zealand to join the faculty of the School of Accounting and Commercial Law at Victoria University of Wellington, rising to full professor.^[3]

Lai's research focuses on the interaction between Western intellectual property systems and indigenous knowledge, specifically Mātauranga Māori. She has investigated how the patenting system addresses problematic technologies such as a gene-related technology, and also examines law and feminism, knowledge theorisation and legal sociology. Lai has written publicly about issues such as country of origin labelling, the difference between a trade mark and a certification mark in regards to the 'Rainbow tick', and differences between men and women in STEM.^{[4][5][6][2][3]}

In 2018 Lai and colleague Susie Frankel were awarded a Marsden grant on "Mission Creep” in the Pharmaceutical Industry and its Impact on Innovation and Health. In 2021, Lai was awarded a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship for a project titled Patents and power: a critical analysis of knowledge governance.^[2]

Scholia has a profile for Jessica C. Lai (Q91860494).

• Lai, Jessica C. (2022). Indigenous Cultural Heritage and Intellectual Property Rights: Learning from the New Zealand Experience?. Springer Cham (published 8 January 2014). p. 331. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-02955-9. ISBN 978-3-319-02955-9.
• Graber, Christoph Beat; Kuprecht, Karolina; Lai, Jessica Christine, eds. (30 November 2012). International Trade in Indigenous Cultural Heritage: Legal and Policy Issues. ElgarOnline. ISBN 9780857938305.
• Lai, Jessica C. (2022). Patent Law and Women Tackling Gender Bias in Knowledge Governance. Routledge. ISBN 9781032079578.
• Frankel, Susie; Lai, Jessica C. (1 October 2016). Patent Law and Policy. LexisNexis. ISBN 9781927183830.

• Jessica C. Lai (2015). "Myriad Genetics and the BRCA Patents in Europe: The Implications of the U.S. Supreme Court Decision". UC Irvine Law Review. 5: 1041. Wikidata Q125876491.
• Jessica C Lai (12 April 2020). "The Role of Patents as a Gendered Chameleon". Social & Legal Studies. 30 (2): 203–229. doi:10.1177/0964663920916237. ISSN 0964-6639. Wikidata Q125875560.
• Jessica Christine Lai (2010). "Māori Culture in the Modern World: Its Creation, Appropriation and Trade". SSRN Electronic Journal. doi:10.2139/SSRN.1961482. ISSN 1556-5068. Wikidata Q125876540.
• Vikas Kathuria; Jessica C. Lai (December 2018). "User review portability: Why and how?". Computer Law & Security Review. 34 (6): 1291–1299. doi:10.1016/J.CLSR.2018.05.018. ISSN 0267-3649. Wikidata Q115087703.

• Closing the Gap: Obstacles Faced by Women in IP, webinar featuring Jessica Lai, Maryam Khajeh Tabari, and Patricia Martone, 22 Nov 2023, via YouTube