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Full-Text Articles in Law
Torts And Innovation, Gideon Parchomovsky, Alex Stein
Torts And Innovation, Gideon Parchomovsky, Alex Stein
All Faculty Scholarship
This Essay exposes and analyzes a hitherto overlooked cost of the current design of tort law: its adverse effect on innovation. Tort liability for negligence, defective products, and medical malpractice is determined by reference to custom. We demonstrate that courts’ reliance on custom and conventional technologies as the benchmark of liability chills innovation and distorts its path. Specifically, the recourse to custom taxes innovators and subsidizes replicators of conventional technologies. We explore the causes and consequences of this phenomenon and propose two possible ways to modify tort law in order to make it more welcoming to innovation.
Viewing Virtual Property Ownership Through The Lens Of Innovation, Ryan G. Vacca
Viewing Virtual Property Ownership Through The Lens Of Innovation, Ryan G. Vacca
Law Faculty Scholarship
Over the past several years scholars have wrestled with how property rights in items created in virtual worlds should be conceptualized. Regardless of how the property is conceptualized and what property theory best fits, most agree the law ought to recognize virtual property as property and vest someone with those rights.