The lawyer who asks who owns Black genius

Lisa E. Davis wanted to be a lawyer from the age of eight, growing up in Brooklyn, and for a time planned to run for president because the presidents she knew of were lawyers. A scholarship, a friend’s tip and a campus visit in which everyone looked happy brought her to NYU Law. After graduating in 1985 she clerked for Constance Baker Motley, the first Black woman to serve as a federal judge, who once held up a newspaper headline about first-year salaries and told her law clerks to go get that money.

Entertainment law arrived through a friend from law school and a party. A friend from NYU Law, then an entertainment lawyer at Frankfurt, offered to walk her résumé in. At about the same time Davis met Spike Lee, the friend’s client, at a party, and he soon began pestering the firm to hire her. By 1988 she was at Frankfurt, and one of her first clients was Public Enemy. Today she chairs the firm’s entertainment group and counts Wendell Pierce and documentarian Stanley Nelson among her clients; past ones include Lee, Terry McMillan and Missy Elliott.

All AI is is pattern recognition.

Lisa E. Davis, NYU Law Q&A

Her book, Our Minds Were Always Free: A History of How Black Brilliance Was Exploited, and the Fight to Retake Control, began in 2020 as an early-morning, weekend project. It ranges from Onesimus, an enslaved African who helped introduce a method of smallpox inoculation in the 1700s, to Sidney Poitier’s independent production company, founded in 1969. She says she had never heard of Thomas Jennings, who patented a method of dry cleaning, until her research; her grandfather ran a dry-cleaning business. Three law students did library research for her, and they met weekly.

The reason it matters now, she says, is artificial intelligence. She is troubled by how fast large companies are embracing it, as if human creativity were not special, and her answer is that it can only look backward. How do you make anything new, she asks, if you take people out of the equation?