Public Biography
Morris Blatt is a senior partner at Blatt, Grunewald & Peck, a boutique litigation firm in Newark, New Jersey, that specializes in what Mr. Blatt describes as “ancestral intellectual property” — legal claims arising from the uncompensated use of a deceased person’s ideas, innovations, or creative output by subsequent generations.
Mr. Blatt received his J.D. from Seton Hall University School of Law in 1997 and practiced general commercial litigation for fifteen years before pivoting to his current specialty. He has said that the pivot was inspired by a 2012 case in which he represented the grandchildren of a plumber who had invented a particular valve fitting in 1948, only to see the design adopted industry-wide without credit. The case was dismissed, but Mr. Blatt described the experience as “formative.”
He is the author of a self-published legal monograph, The Inheritance of Ideas: A Framework for Multigenerational Intellectual Property Rights (2019), which proposes that intellectual contributions should be treated as heritable assets in perpetuity. The monograph has been cited in zero judicial opinions and reviewed in one legal blog, which called it “creative.”
Mr. Blatt is representing Greta Einstein-Haas in her lawsuit against approximately 40,000 physicists, which he has described as “the most important intellectual property case since the invention of intellectual property.”
He lives in Maplewood, New Jersey, with his wife, a school librarian, and their three cats.