Pamela Samuelson (born August 4, 1948) is an American legal scholar, activist, and philanthropist. She is the Richard M. Sherman '74 Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, where she has been a member of the faculty since 1996. She holds a joint appointment at the UC Berkeley School of Information. She is a co-founder and chair of Authors Alliance and a co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology. She is recognized as a pioneer in digital copyright law, intellectual property, cyberlaw and information policy.

A 1971 graduate of the University of Hawaiʻi and a 1976 graduate of Yale Law School, Samuelson practiced law as a litigation associate with Willkie Farr & Gallagher before becoming an academic. From 1981 through 1996 she was a member of the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, from which she visited at Columbia, Cornell, and Emory Law Schools. Since joining the Berkeley faculty in 1996, she has held visiting professorships at Harvard Law School, NYU School of Law, Toronto Law School, Fordham University School of Law. Since 2002, she has held an honorary professorship at the University of Amsterdam.

Samuelson is a past Fellow of the John D and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2005, she was awarded the Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Award for Social Impact, and in 2010 received the IP3 award from Public Knowledge.

Samuelson has published over 300 articles for law, technical, and general audiences, focused mainly on copyright law and preserving balance in copyright law amidst innovation and technological change.

Although her work is typically directed at U.S. law, it also includes comparative study of U.S. and European approaches to intellectual property.

Samuelson has written about two distinct problems that generative AI poses for copyright law. First: when a computer program generates a work, who owns the copyright to that work? In 1985, Samuelson argued that copyright for works created by computer programs should be allocated to the user of the program, rather than to the computer, the programmer, or some combination of those parties. She also forecast that "[a]s 'artificial intelligence' (AI) programs become increasingly sophisticated in their role as the 'assistants' of humans in the [creation] of a wide range of products... the question of who will own what rights in the 'output' of such programs may well become a hotly contested issue."

More recently, the advent of large language models such as ChatGPT has sparked lawsuits by copyright holders over the use of their works as "training" material for the programs. Samuelson has argued that such training may well constitute fair use, and warned that allowing copyright holders to restrict use of their works as training materials would "affect everyone who deploys generative AI, integrates it into their products, and uses it for scientific research."

Fair use permits the unlicensed use of original expression from copyright-protected works in certain circumstances. However, the flexibility of the doctrine led Judge Pierre Leval to describe it as "mysterious" and lament the perception that it is a "disorderly basket of exceptions".