There Can Be Two “BUs.” The Fight Was Over How They Drew the Letters.

Case Analysis | September 12, 2026

Two universities can both be “BU.”

That was never really the problem.

The problem was what happened when Boston University stopped putting the letters B and U comfortably next to one another and began using them in an interlocking design that Baylor says looks far too much like the mark it has spent more than a century building into its identity.

Now the schools appear ready to settle the resulting federal trademark case. But there is an important procedural point hiding behind the headline: no judge ever decided who was right.

Baylor filed a notice on September 9, 2026, telling the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas that the parties had reached at least a partial settlement and were working toward a final written agreement. Baylor said it expected either to dismiss the case or update Judge Alan Albright on the settlement by September 23. The terms have not been publicly disclosed.

That means there is no holding that Boston University infringed Baylor’s trademark. There is no ruling that Boston was entitled to continue using its interlocking logo. And there is no judicial interpretation of the nearly 40-year-old agreement that sat at the center of the dispute.

What there is, instead, is a useful lesson about how trademarks actually work.

Trademark law does not necessarily give Baylor ownership of the letters “BU.” It can, however, protect the way Baylor presents those letters as a brand.

And an agreement written in 1988 can become much more important once ecommerce, national merchandising, athletic branding, and online retail turn what once looked like geographically separate university identities into brands competing on the same digital shelf.

Baylor filed Baylor University v. Trustees of Boston University, No. 6:25-cv-00352, in the Western District of Texas on August 8, 2025. The case is assigned to U.S. District Judge Alan D. Albright. Baylor asserted federal trademark infringement under Section 32 of the Lanham Act, federal unfair competition and false designation of origin under Section 43(a), and related Texas trademark claims.

The lawsuit was deliberately narrow.

Baylor did not claim that Boston University had to surrender the initials “BU.” Its complaint expressly acknowledged Boston University’s longstanding use of those initials and said Baylor had no objection to Boston’s traditional side-by-side presentation of them.

Baylor drew the line at the interlocking design.

According to the complaint, Baylor has used an interlocking BU mark since at least 1912 and owns multiple federal registrations covering the design for apparel, educational services, bags, drinkware, flags, and other goods and services. Importantly, Baylor’s cited federal registrations do not claim particular colors. So the fact that Baylor generally uses green and gold while Boston uses scarlet and white would not necessarily dispose of the similarity question.

Baylor alleged that it discovered Boston selling three styles of hats bearing an interlocking BU design through its campus store in 2018. Baylor says it objected as Boston’s use expanded, including through a December 2021 communication, but that Boston continued expanding the design onto merchandise, club-sports branding, and its branding materials.

The remedy Baylor initially sought was substantial but largely forward-looking: a permanent injunction barring Boston from using the challenged interlocking design or confusingly similar marks; destruction of goods, packaging, advertising, and other materials bearing the mark; a sworn compliance report; costs and interest; and other appropriate relief.

The case therefore was not really about who gets to call itself “BU.”

It was about where shared initials end and proprietary design begins.

To understand why this dispute was difficult, go back almost four decades.

When Baylor sought federal registration of its interlocking BU mark for clothing in 1987, Boston University opposed the application. The schools resolved that dispute through a 1988 consent or coexistence agreement, after which Boston withdrew its opposition and the trademark proceeding was dismissed.

The agreement recognized a practical reality: both institutions had legitimate reasons to use “BU.”

As Baylor quoted it in the complaint, preventing either university from using its own initials would be commercially harmful because school initials commonly appear on products through which students, alumni, and fans express allegiance.

That sounds straightforward.

It was not.

Baylor’s position was essentially that the agreement permitted both schools to remain “BU,” but did not authorize Boston University to adopt an interlocking design that crossed into Baylor’s specific trademark territory.

Boston University read the history differently.

In April 2026, Boston moved for judgment on the pleadings. It argued that the written agreement reflected the parties’ acknowledgment that their BU marks had coexisted for decades without confusion and that Baylor was improperly trying to recast Boston’s historical use as something newly infringing. After Baylor amended its complaint, Boston renewed that motion on May 29 and completed briefing with a reply on June 22.

That was a strategically significant move.

A Rule 12(c) motion for judgment on the pleadings asks the court to resolve a case—or at least part of it—based on the pleadings and materials properly considered with them, without waiting for a full trial record.

Boston was therefore trying to turn the old agreement into an early exit.

Instead of spending months or years battling over consumer surveys, merchandise channels, purchaser sophistication, actual confusion, and expert testimony, Boston’s position was effectively that the parties had already allocated their rights long ago.

The court never decided whether that argument worked.

The settlement arrived first.

Had the case continued on the ordinary infringement track, Baylor ultimately would have needed to establish that Boston’s challenged use created a likelihood of confusion about source, affiliation, sponsorship, or approval.

In the Fifth Circuit, courts evaluate that question through a flexible set of factors known as the “digits of confusion”: the strength of the senior mark; similarity of the marks; similarity of the products or services; overlap in retail outlets and purchasers; overlap in advertising; the defendant’s intent; evidence of actual confusion; and the degree of care exercised by purchasers. No single factor automatically controls.

Baylor had some obvious strengths.

First, the challenged designs are visually close enough that the similarity factor was unlikely to be trivial. Baylor also alleged that both schools were using the marks on the same basic category of products: collegiate merchandise.

Second, modern retail makes the schools less geographically separate than they may have seemed in 1988. A Baylor fan in Massachusetts and a Boston University alumnus in Texas can shop online. National apparel licensing and ecommerce flatten geography.

Third, Baylor’s registrations did not depend upon green and gold. Boston could therefore not necessarily reduce the dispute to “our logo is red, theirs is green.”

And Baylor could argue that the old agreement itself reinforced an important distinction: the institutions could share BU, while maintaining different visual identities.

But Boston had serious arguments of its own.

Boston did not need to prove that the logos looked nothing alike.

Its better argument was historical.

The 1988 agreement reportedly memorialized decades of simultaneous use, acknowledged that the institutions operated in divergent markets, and noted the absence of documented confusion over a long period. Boston’s Rule 12(c) strategy sought to make that history legally dispositive—or at least powerful enough to defeat Baylor’s theory at the pleading stage.

That point matters because trademark law protects against likely consumer confusion. It does not exist merely to reward whoever has the older logo.

Boston also could have emphasized how people actually purchase university merchandise.

Someone buying a Boston University rugby shirt may know perfectly well that the shirt is connected to Boston University. Someone buying Baylor football merchandise probably knows which Baylor he or she supports. University affiliation can make consumers unusually source-conscious even when the goods themselves—a hat, shirt, sweatshirt, or mug—are inexpensive.

And the absence of meaningful evidence of actual confusion after substantial coexistence could have mattered. The Fifth Circuit has repeatedly described actual confusion as especially probative, although it is not required.

So Baylor had a powerful visual-similarity case.

Boston had a potentially powerful consumer-context and contractual-history case.

Neither was frivolous.

That is precisely why the old agreement mattered so much.

Nothing on the trademark merits.

That needs to be said plainly because “Baylor and Boston University settle trademark case” can easily mutate into “Baylor established ownership of the interlocking BU” once headlines get compressed.

Judge Albright did not hold that Boston infringed.

He did not hold that there was a likelihood of confusion.

He did not hold that the 1988 agreement prohibited Boston’s interlocking design.

He did not grant Baylor an injunction.

And he did not grant Boston’s motion for judgment on the pleadings.

The last publicly reported posture is that the parties have reached at least a partial settlement, are finalizing written terms, and expect to dismiss the case or update the court by September 23.

So there is no precedent here.

That limitation is important.

A university cannot cite this settlement as a judicial ruling that interlocking initials belong to the first school that uses them. Nor can another defendant cite it as authority that different school colors eliminate confusion.

The legal questions remain unresolved because the parties chose not to let the judge answer them.

That does not mean the litigation was pointless.

Quite the opposite.

Settlement can be the rational result precisely because both sides have valuable rights they do not want a court defining too broadly.

For Baylor, an adverse interpretation of the 1988 agreement could have weakened its ability to challenge Boston’s use and potentially complicated future enforcement against third parties.

For Boston, an adverse ruling could have forced a costly rebrand, destruction or withdrawal of merchandise, changes to club-sports uniforms and branding, and restrictions on future licensing.

The stakes therefore extended beyond the inventory already sitting in a campus store.

Each side faced the risk that a judicial interpretation of a 1988 agreement would become the rule governing its brand for years.

Settlement allows the universities to do something a court cannot do nearly as elegantly: draw a new line.

A new agreement can specify exact designs, permissible color treatments, spacing, interlocking configurations, product categories, athletics uses, digital uses, merchandising channels, approval procedures, and what happens when branding evolves again.

In other words, the dispute that began because an old coexistence agreement became unclear can end with a better coexistence agreement.

That may be the most commercially sensible outcome available.

The case is also a useful antidote to a common misconception about trademark law.

Baylor does not own the letters B and U.

Trademark law generally protects source-identifying uses of words, symbols, designs, and combinations—not language or letters in the abstract.

That distinction is why Baylor could concede that Boston University may call itself “BU” while simultaneously arguing that one particular visual presentation crossed the line.

Think of the difference this way:

Two companies might both have legitimate reasons to use the same letters. That does not necessarily mean both can use the same font, arrangement, proportions, logo structure, product category, and merchandising presentation if the total commercial impression begins to point consumers toward the same source.

You cannot own the alphabet. You can build protectable goodwill in the way you arrange it.

That is particularly important in college sports, where logos are no longer just painted on a midfield wall.

They are licensed assets.

They appear on apparel, collectibles, digital products, social media, sponsorship inventory, video games, retail platforms, club-sports equipment, and merchandise sold nationally.

The more universities commercialize their identities, the more likely once-local marks are to collide.

There is another lesson here for sports and entertainment businesses.

A coexistence agreement negotiated in 1988 necessarily reflects the commercial world of 1988.

There was no modern ecommerce market.

No social-media branding department.

No direct-to-consumer merchandise ecosystem.

No university licensing operation functioning exactly as it does today.

No expectation that a logo appearing on a niche campus item might later be displayed to buyers nationally through a website.

That does not make an old agreement invalid.

It makes drafting important.

A strong coexistence agreement should anticipate not merely what the parties are doing today, but how their brands might evolve tomorrow.

That can mean addressing:

If an agreement simply says both parties may use “BU,” the next generation of brand managers may eventually have to answer the harder question:

Which BU? Drawn how? Used where? Sold on what?

That is how a peace treaty becomes a lawsuit.

As of September 12, the written settlement terms have not been publicly disclosed.

Baylor told the court it expected the agreement to be finalized and said it would either file a notice of dismissal or provide another status update by September 23, 2026.

The most important thing to watch is whether any final filing reveals how Boston University may use the interlocking design going forward.

If Boston stops using it, Baylor will have achieved much of the practical relief it originally sought without obtaining a judicial infringement ruling.

If Boston retains some form of the design subject to restrictions, the result may look more like a modernized coexistence agreement than a surrender.

Either way, the case leaves the law largely where it found it.

But it leaves universities and other brand owners with a useful warning.

Sharing the same initials can work for decades. Sharing the same visual identity is harder. And when two brands agree to coexist, the most important words in the agreement may be the ones nobody thought they needed to write yet.