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Intellectual Property Law

Selected Works

2012

Law and Economics

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Law

Property Rights Legislation In Agricultural Biotechnology: United States And Argentina, Andres A. Gallo, Jay P. Kesan May 2012

Property Rights Legislation In Agricultural Biotechnology: United States And Argentina, Andres A. Gallo, Jay P. Kesan

Andres A. Gallo

The market for biotechnology products has expanded rapidly in the 1990s and is expected to give impulse to radical changes in agriculture around the world. Investment in research and development (R&D) of new seed varieties has become a key factor for agriculture development. In the last decades, the investment in R&D has switched from state sponsored research to private funding. At the same time, the market has moved towards a strong concentration in a few multinational firms, which now control most of the agricultural biotechnology R&D around the world. One of the most important issues regarding ag-biotechnology is the legal …


The Relational Contingency Of Rights, Alex Stein, Gideon Parchomovsky Dec 2011

The Relational Contingency Of Rights, Alex Stein, Gideon Parchomovsky

Alex Stein

In this Article, we demonstrate, contrary to conventional wisdom, that all rights are relationally contingent. Our main thesis is that rights afford their holders meaningful protection only against challengers who face higher litigation costs than the rightholder. Contrariwise, challengers who can litigate more cheaply than a rightholder can force the rightholder to forfeit the right and thereby render the right ineffective. Consequently, in the real world, rights avail only against certain challengers but not others. This result is robust and pervasive. Furthermore, it obtains irrespectively of how rights and other legal entitlements are defined by the legislator or construed by …