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Full-Text Articles in Law
Self-Replicating Technologies, Jeremy N. Sheff
Self-Replicating Technologies, Jeremy N. Sheff
Faculty Publications
Self-replicating technologies pose a challenge to the legal regimes we ordinarily rely on to promote a balance between innovation and competition. This Article examines recent efforts by the federal courts to deal with the leading edge of this policy challenge in cases involving the quintessential self-replicating technology: the seed. In a recent series of cases involving the invocation of the patent exhaustion defense by purchasers of Monsanto’s “Roundup-Ready” genetically engineered herbicide-resistant crop technologies, farmers have argued that Monsanto’s patent rights do not extend to the second generation of soybeans grown from a patented first-generation seed. In each case, the Federal …
Marks, Morals, And Markets, Jeremy N. Sheff
Marks, Morals, And Markets, Jeremy N. Sheff
Faculty Publications
The prevailing justification for trademark law depends on economic arguments that cannot account for much of the law's recent development, nor for mounting empirical evidence that consumer decisionmaking is inconsistent with assumptions of rational choice. But the only extant theoretical alternative to economic analysis is a Lockean "natural rights" theory that scholars have found even more unsatisfying. This Article proposes a third option. I analyze the law of trademarks and unfair competition as a system of moral obligations between producers and consumers. Drawing on the contractualist tradition in moral philosophy, I develop and apply a new theoretical framework to evaluate …