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Full-Text Articles in Law
Correlative Obligation In Patent Law: The Role Of Public Good In Defining The Limits Of Patent Exclusivity, Srividhya Ragavan
Correlative Obligation In Patent Law: The Role Of Public Good In Defining The Limits Of Patent Exclusivity, Srividhya Ragavan
Faculty Scholarship
In light of the recent outrageous price-spiking of pharmaceuticals, this Article questions the underlying justifications for exclusive rights conferred by the grant of a patent. Traditionally, patents are defined as property rights granted to encourage desirable innovation. This definition is a misfit as treating patents as property rights does a poor job of defining the limits of the patent rights as well as the public benefit goals of the system. This misfit gradually caused an imbalance in the rights versus duties construct within patent law. After a thorough analysis of the historical and philosophical perspectives of patent exclusivity, this Article …
Apple Pay, Bitcoin, And Consumers: The Abcs Of Future Public Payments Law, Mark Edwin Burge
Apple Pay, Bitcoin, And Consumers: The Abcs Of Future Public Payments Law, Mark Edwin Burge
Faculty Scholarship
As technology rolls out ongoing and competing streams of payments innovation, exemplified by Apple Pay (mobile payments) and Bitcoin (cryptocurrency), the law governing these payments appears hopelessly behind the curve. The patchwork of state, federal, and private legal rules seems more worthy of condemnation than emulation. This Article argues, however, that the legal and market developments of the last several decades in payment systems provide compelling evidence of the most realistic and socially beneficial future for payments law. The paradigm of a comprehensive public law regulatory scheme for payment systems, exemplified by Articles 3 and 4 of the Uniform Commercial …
Contract Development In A Matching Market: The Case Of Kidney Exchange, Kimberly D. Krawiec, Wenhao Liu, Marc L. Melcher
Contract Development In A Matching Market: The Case Of Kidney Exchange, Kimberly D. Krawiec, Wenhao Liu, Marc L. Melcher
Faculty Scholarship
We analyze a new transplant innovation — Advanced Donation, referred to by some as a kidney “gift certificate,” “layaway plan,” or “voucher — as a case study offering insights on both market and contract development. Advanced Donation provides an unusual window into the evolution of the exchange of a single good — a kidney for transplantation — from gift, to simple barter, to exchange with a temporal separation of obligations that relies solely on trust and reputational constraints for enforcement, to a complex matching market in which the parties rely, at least in part, on formal contract to define and …
The Corporation As Courthouse, Rory Van Loo
The Corporation As Courthouse, Rory Van Loo
Faculty Scholarship
Despite the considerable attention paid to mandatory arbitration, few consumer disputes ever reach arbitration. By contrast, institutions such as Apple’s customer service department handle hundreds of millions of disputes annually. This Article argues that understanding businesses’ internal dispute processes is crucial to diagnosing consumers’ procedural needs. Moreover, businesses’ internal processes interact with a larger system of private actors. These actors include ratings websites that mete out reputational sanctions. The system also includes other corporations linked to the transaction, such as when American Express adjudicates a contested sale between a shopper and Home Depot. This vast private order offers promise to …
Fiduciary-Isms: A Study Of Academic Influence On The Expansion Of The Law, Daniel B. Yeager
Fiduciary-Isms: A Study Of Academic Influence On The Expansion Of The Law, Daniel B. Yeager
Faculty Scholarship
Fiduciary law aspires to nullify power imbalances by obligating strong parties to give themselves over to servient parties. For example, due to profound imbalances of legal know-how, lawyers must as fiduciaries pursue their clients’ interests, not their own, lest clients get lost in the competitive shuffle. As a peculiar hybrid of status and contract relations, politics and law, compassion and capitalism, fiduciary law is very much in vogue in academic circles. As vogue as it is, there remains room for my “Fiduciary-isms...”, a meditation on the expansion of fiduciary law from its origins in the law of trusts through partnerships, …
The Common Law Of Contract And The Default Rule Project, Alan Schwartz, Robert E. Scott
The Common Law Of Contract And The Default Rule Project, Alan Schwartz, Robert E. Scott
Faculty Scholarship
The common law developed over centuries a small set of default rules that courts have used to fill gaps in otherwise incomplete contracts between commercial parties. These rules can be applied almost independently of context: the market damages rule, for example, requires a court only to know the difference between market and contract prices. When parties in various sectors of the economy write sales contracts but leave terms blank, courts fill in the blanks with their own rules. As a consequence, a judicial rule that many parties accept must be "transcontextual": parties in varied commercial contexts accept the courts' rule …