Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 18 of 18
Full-Text Articles in Law
The Fundamental Building Blocks Of Social Relations Regarding Resources: Hohfeld In Europe And Beyond, Anna Di Robilant, Talha Syed
The Fundamental Building Blocks Of Social Relations Regarding Resources: Hohfeld In Europe And Beyond, Anna Di Robilant, Talha Syed
Faculty Scholarship
In the hundred years since Hohfeld published his two “Fundamental Legal Conceptions” articles, the “bundle-of-rights” view of property associated with his work has come to enjoy the status of conventional wisdom in American legal scholarship. Seen as a corrective to lay conceptions and a predecessor “Blackstonian” view of property as the “sole and despotic dominion” of an “owner” over a thing, the central insight of Hohfeldian analysis is standardly taken to be that property is not a single “thing” but rather a “bundle of rights” with respect to things and persons. In recent years, however, this Hohfeldian view has come …
Property's Building Blocks: Hohfeld In Europe And Beyond, Anna Di Robilant
Property's Building Blocks: Hohfeld In Europe And Beyond, Anna Di Robilant
Faculty Scholarship
In the hundred years since Hohfeld published his two “Fundamental Legal Conceptions” articles, the “bundle-of-rights” view of property associated with his work has come to enjoy the status of conventional wisdom in American legal scholarship. Seen as a corrective to lay conceptions and a predecessor “Blackstonian” view of property as the “sole and despotic dominion” of an “owner” over a thing, the central insight of Hohfeldian analysis is commonly taken to be that property is not a single “thing” but rather a “bundle of rights” with respect to things and persons. In recent years, however, this Hohfeldian view has come …
A Research Agenda For The History Of Property Law In Europe, Inspired By And Dedicated To Marc Poirier, Anna Di Robilant
A Research Agenda For The History Of Property Law In Europe, Inspired By And Dedicated To Marc Poirier, Anna Di Robilant
Faculty Scholarship
Proposes the following research agenda: (a) understanding the relation between property and long-term economic change by focusing on the relation between property law and what historians call "social property" relations; (b) understanding property concepts and ideas in the context of the larger ideological and philosophical ideas that shaped the immediate world of jurists and property lawyers; (c) looking beyond the single, contingent episodes of the history of property law and identifying longterm patterns and regularities in the way jurists conceptualized property; and (d) understanding European property culture in its many entanglements with the non-European world.
Fairer Uses, Jessica Silbey
Fairer Uses, Jessica Silbey
Faculty Scholarship
A response to Professor Joseph Liu’s paper on Fair Use, Notice Failure, and the Limits of Copyright as Property, this essay challenges Professor Liu to go even farther in his analysis and protection of the everyday audience of copyright works. In describing and analyzing what I term “fairer uses” on the basis of qualitative data from interviews of artists and authors who make and rely on copyrighted works for their own creativity and professional well-being, I support Professor Liu’s advocacy for maintaining “fuzzy boundaries” of fair use. Based on evidence from grounded practice of professional creators, their expansive application …
Patent Variation: Discerning Diversity Among Patent Functions, Jessica Silbey
Patent Variation: Discerning Diversity Among Patent Functions, Jessica Silbey
Faculty Scholarship
This Article describes and analyzes qualitative interview data collected over a five-year period. The goal of the interviews was to explore the roles of intellectual property (“IP”) in IP rich fields. Interviews were with diverse actors in a wide-range of industries: film, book publishing, visual arts, internet commerce, biology, engineering, chemistry, computer science. The data described and analyzed in this Article focuses on the specific question about the diverse functioning of patents in the subset of interviewees who are scientists and engineers, their lawyers and business partners. The Article proceeds in two parts. Part I describes the empirical dimension of …
Comparative Tales Of Origins And Access: Intellectual Property And The Rhetoric Of Social Change, Jessica Silbey
Comparative Tales Of Origins And Access: Intellectual Property And The Rhetoric Of Social Change, Jessica Silbey
Faculty Scholarship
This Article argues that the open-source and anti-expansionist rhetoric of current intellectual-property debates is a revolution of surface rhetoric but not of deep structure. What this Article terms “the Access Movements” are, by now, well-known communities devoted to providing more access to intellectual-property-protected goods, communities such as the Open Source Initiative and Access to Knowledge. This Article engages Movement actors in their critique of the balance struck by recent law (statutes and cases) and asks whether new laws that further restrict access to intellectual property “promote the progress of science and the useful arts.” Relying on cases, statutes and recent …
Imperfect Property Rights, James Bessen
Imperfect Property Rights, James Bessen
Faculty Scholarship
In theory, property rights allow markets to achieve Pareto optimal allocations. But the literature on contracting largely ignores what happens when property rights are imperfectly defined and enforced. Although some models include weak enforcement or poorly defined rights or "anticommons," this paper develops a general model that includes all of these possibilities. I find that combinations matter: Policy prescriptions to remedy individual imperfections are sometimes inappropriate under other conditions. For example, stronger penalties for violating rights can decrease Pareto efficiency, contrary to a common view. Also, collective rights organizations, such as patent pools, sometimes worsen problems of overlapping claims.
Evaluating The Economic Performance Of Property Systems, James Bessen
Evaluating The Economic Performance Of Property Systems, James Bessen
Faculty Scholarship
How should the economic performance of property systems be evaluated? Benefit-cost analysis is widely used to evaluate non-market based regulation when prices are not available. Market prices provide better information for property systems, but market prices are not necessarily socially optimal when property rights are imperfect. This paper discusses two practical approaches to evaluating the performance of property systems, one based on an analysis of institutional performance, the other based on measuring incentives. As an illustration, I show how these approaches might be used to evaluate the US patent system.
Of Patents And Property, Michael J. Meurer, James Bessen
Of Patents And Property, Michael J. Meurer, James Bessen
Faculty Scholarship
Do patents behave substantially like property rights in tangible assets, in that they encourage development and innovation? This article notes that historical evidence, cross-country evidence, economic experiments, and estimates of net benefits all indicate that general property rights institutions have a substantial direct effect on economic growth. Conversely, with a few important exceptions like chemicals and pharmaceuticals, empirical evidence indicates that intellectual property rights have at best only a weak and indirect effect on economic growth. Further, it appears that for public firms in most industries today, patents may actually discourage investment in innovation for fear of winding up on …
Rules For Donations To Tissue Banks: What Next?, George J. Annas
Rules For Donations To Tissue Banks: What Next?, George J. Annas
Faculty Scholarship
Michael Crichton's Next is a fictional creation of multiple catastrophes emanating from the real-life case of John Moore, in which the California Supreme Court ruled in 1990 that Moore did not own his cells after they were removed from his body. As human tissue has become commercially useful, and as tissue banks storing and providing samples for research have flourished, the question of who owns the tissue has become more vital. Next got mixed reviews, but even many scientists, such as Michael Goldman, who reviewed the book in Nature, agree with Crichton that it is imperative that we “establish clear …
Women's Place: Urban Planning, Housing Design, And Work-Family Balance, Katharine B. Silbaugh
Women's Place: Urban Planning, Housing Design, And Work-Family Balance, Katharine B. Silbaugh
Faculty Scholarship
In the past decade a substantial literature has emerged analyzing the role of work-family conflict in hampering women's economic, social, and civil equality. Many of the issues we routinely discuss as work family balance problems have distinct spatial dimensions. 'Place' is by no means the main factor in work-family balance difficulties, but amongst work-family policy-makers it is perhaps the least appreciated. This article examines the role of urban planning and housing design in frustrating the effective balance of work and family responsibilities. Nothing in the literature on work-family balance reform addresses this aspect of the problem. That literature focuses instead …
Fair Followers: Expanding Access To Generic Pharmaceuticals For Low- And Medium-Income Populations, Kevin Outterson
Fair Followers: Expanding Access To Generic Pharmaceuticals For Low- And Medium-Income Populations, Kevin Outterson
Faculty Scholarship
U.S. trade offi cials frequently employ the rhetoric of free riding and piracy when discussing intellectual property (IP) rights for medicines (Drahos with Braithwaite 2002; Benson 2005). The gentler term free rider is applied when developed country governments (OECD) use monopsony power to negotiate price discounts on patented pharmaceuticals (Outterson 2004, 2005b; U.S. Department of Commerce 2004; PhRMA 2005). Poorer governments usually lack suffi cient market power as a purchaser to negotiate discounts for their low- and middle-income populations. In these cases, governments and patients may resort to unlicensed generic drugs and compulsory licensing. In response, U.S. trade offi cials …
Commentary On Economic And Ethical Reasons For Protecting Data, Wendy J. Gordon
Commentary On Economic And Ethical Reasons For Protecting Data, Wendy J. Gordon
Faculty Scholarship
Like Jane Ginsburg, I would like to drop back a bit, to talk about more general principles. Essentially, both of our primary speakers focused on a distinction between property and non-property modes of protecting data. I would like to highlight the economic and ethical reasons for maintaining that distinction.
Bankruptcy Law V. Privacy Rights: Which Holds The Trump Card?, Maureen A. O'Rourke
Bankruptcy Law V. Privacy Rights: Which Holds The Trump Card?, Maureen A. O'Rourke
Faculty Scholarship
The Internet's emergence as a retail marketplace has both posed new issues and cast old problems in a new light. As technology, particularly software, has advanced over time, traditional bricks and mortar firms have acquired the capability of tracking and analyzing all sorts of information about their customers, including purchasing patterns and demographic information. For years, firms have been licensing and selling such customer data both in and out of bankruptcy without much fear of legal limitations. In particular, the law has generally not adopted privacy rules that would present a barrier to commerce in personal information.
Property Rights And Competition On The Internet: In Search Of An Appropriate Analogy, Maureen A. O'Rourke
Property Rights And Competition On The Internet: In Search Of An Appropriate Analogy, Maureen A. O'Rourke
Faculty Scholarship
Reasoning by analogy is a time-honored method of legal development. However, recent litigation exposes the weakness of applying legal principles developed in the "bricks and mortar" world by analogy to cyberspace. Using recent court decisions that discuss who may access a website and by what means, this Article illustrates how results can change depending on the analogy the court adopts. The Article argues that rather than searching for analogies, courts and legislators could more profitably devote their energies to understanding how the Internet differs from physical space, evaluating whether those differences call for new legal rules, and considering the conflicting …
A Theory Of Minimum Contract Terms, With Implications For Labor Law, Keith N. Hylton
A Theory Of Minimum Contract Terms, With Implications For Labor Law, Keith N. Hylton
Faculty Scholarship
This Paper deals with a topic at the core of labor, property, and contract law: to what extent should individuals be free to enter into agreements of their choice? In many instances, the state intervenes to tell parties that they may not execute or enforce certain agreements, or that they must incorporate certain "minimum terms." A broad view of property rights would support the position that individuals are free to enter into whatever agreements suit them. A narrow view, on the other hand, is consistent with the claim that the state may require contracting parties to comply with a set …
The Social Origins Of Property, Jack M. Beermann, Joseph William Singer
The Social Origins Of Property, Jack M. Beermann, Joseph William Singer
Faculty Scholarship
The takings clause of the United States Constitution requires government to pay compensation when private property is taken for public use.' When government regulates, but does not physically seize, property, the Supreme Court of the United States has had trouble defining when individuals have been deprived of property rights so as to give them a right to compensation. The takings clause serves "to bar Government from forcing some people alone to bear public burdens that, in all fairness and justice, should be borne by the public as a whole."' To determine when a regulation amounts to a "taking" of property …
Tax Characterization Of International Leases: The Contours Of Ownership, William W. Park
Tax Characterization Of International Leases: The Contours Of Ownership, William W. Park
Faculty Scholarship
Pondering the human tendency to pay dearly for short-lived adornments, Shakespeare asks a question of interest to lawyers as well as poets: "Why so large cost, having so short a lease.. .? The lawyer's analysis of the issue might begin with a scenario set in an imaginary world in which the tax effects of business transactions are determined by their legal form rather than their economic substance. In such a world, each of two companies decides to build a new factory. One acquires the land outright, paying in several installments. The other enters into a shortterm lease at a very …