Law Commons^™

A Theory Of Law And Information: Copyright, Spleens, Blackmail, And Insider Trading, James Boyle

Faculty Scholarship

In this Article, Professor Boyle undertakes an analysis of the law's treatment of information across four apparently disparate realms: copyright, genetic information, blackmail, and insider trading. He argues that questions of information regulation, commodification, and access are shaped by two neglected processes of interpretive construction. First, such issues are often decided by pigeonholing them into implicitly contradictory stereotypes of "public" or "private" information. These conflicting stereotypes have their roots in basic assumptions about politics, the market, and privacy in a liberal state. Second, Professor Boyle argues that tension between these stereotypes is often apparently resolved by the use of a …