Adam Chaim Belsky

Adam Belsky specializes in intellectual property, antitrust, general business litigation, media law, and class actions. He has extensive experience handling copyright, trademark and trade secret litigation, complex commercial litigation, defamation, invasion of privacy, employment discrimination, and other constitutional and civil rights cases.  He represents Burning Man on a variety of matters, and joyfully attends the event.  He has an active practice representing foreign countries in litigation in the United States, including on behalf of Cuba, South Africa, and Bolivia.  He also has substantial appellate experience in both federal and state court.

Adam is active in pro bono work, representing the “found-sound” artists Negativland in a contractual and intellectual property dispute with their record company, obtaining a successful settlement in which Negativland regained the rights to a number of their recordings. He has represented a class of migrant farmworkers in California who were charged excessive rents at state-run farmworker housing centers, negotiating a settlement entitling the farmworkers to a 100% refund of the overcharge plus interest.  He has also represented Muslim prison inmates in a successful appeal of their civil rights action for discrimination and violation of their free exercise of religion.

Adam received his A.B. degree from Amherst College in 1984, and his law degree from Boalt Hall at the University of California at Berkeley in 1989, where he was Note and Comment editor on the California Law Review and graduated in the top one percent of his class. He served as a law clerk to the Honorable Stanley A. Weigel, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, from 1989-90. Adam is a member of the California and various federal court bars. He is the co-author of “Implied Waiver Under the FSIA: A Proposed Exception to Immunity for Violations of Peremptory Norms of International Law,” published at 77 Cal. L. Rev. 365 (1989).