He attended the University of Illinois as a Comparative Literature major and was a varsity epée fencer on two Big Ten championship teams,[8] placing 4th in the Conference and 18th in the nation at the 1981 NCAA fencing finals.

After law school he clerked during the 1988-89 judicial term for the Honorable Frank M. Johnson, Jr., a well-known jurist portrayed by Martin Sheen in the 2014 movie Selma.

"[12] The graph to the right summarizes his findings on the effect of copyright on the availability of a random sample of fiction and non-fiction titles on Amazon.

As described in Science Daily: "Law professor Paul Heald says overall varietal diversity of the $20 billion market for vegetable crops and apples in the U.S. actually has increased over the past 100 years, a finding that should change the highly politicized debate over intellectual property policy.

In a 1993 paper published in the Journal of Intellectual Property Law, Heald explored remedies for copyfraud, suggesting that payment demands for spurious copyrights might be resisted in civil lawsuits under a number of commerce-law theories: (1) Breach of warranty of title; (2) unjust enrichment; (3) fraud; and (4) false advertising.