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Full-Text Articles in Law
Torts And Innovation, Gideon Parchomovsky, Alex Stein
Torts And Innovation, Gideon Parchomovsky, Alex Stein
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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.
Schumpeterian Competition And Antitrust, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Schumpeterian Competition And Antitrust, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
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Joseph Schumpeter's vision of competition saw it as a destructive process in which effort, assets and fortunes were continuously destroyed by innovation. One possible implication is that antitrust's attention on short-run price and output issues is myopic: what seems at first glance to be a monopolistic exclusionary practice might really be an innovative enterprise with enormous payoffs in the long run. While this may be the case, three qualifications are critical. First, one must not confuse the prospect of innovation with the scope of the intellectual property laws; their excesses and special interest capture cast serious doubt on the proposition …