Law Commons^™

Contract Adjudication In A Collaborative Economy, Matthew C. Jennejohn

Matthew C Jennejohn

In order to explore the debate between contextualist versus formalist contract interpretation, this article examines dispute resolution procedures in a novel class of contracts: agreements governing inter-firm collaboration. Analysis of these contracts reveals two phenomena: first, agreements governing collaboration include arbitration clauses more frequently than other commercial contracts; and second, these agreements routinely situate arbitration at the summit of complex escalation procedures. These observations raise, in turn, the following inter-related questions: first, why do collaborators avoid litigation; and second, what makes escalated and private dispute resolution appropriate?

The article’s central claim is that litigation is shunned because contemporary contextualist contract …

Why Typefaces Proliferate Without Copyright Protection, Blake Fry

Blake Fry

Classic economic theory predicts that without copyright protection authors and publishers would not have sufficient incentive to invest the time or money needed to produce or distribute new works, and the public would suffer a shortage. Copyrights are an attempt to solve this problem. By granting a monopoly to the author of an expressive work the government gives him the sole right to copy it. If only the author has this right, authors will get a reasonable rate of return, and thus a sufficient incentive to create new works. However, empirical evidence on whether adequate expressive works would be created …

Untapped Inventive Potential In U.S. Communities, Michael Meehan

Michael Meehan PhD

This paper combines the 2000 U.S. Census data and the National Bureau of Economic Research’s (NBER) Patent Citation Data File in order to analyze how certain community-level population and community factors correlate with overall patenting and relative rates of assigned and unassigned patenting. Among the interesting findings discussed are that, in addition to the fact that overall patenting increased with higher populations of employed people, higher populations of people with either terminal undergraduate or master’s degrees, and higher median income, the overall rates of patenting decreased, and did not merely remain the level, as the other sectors of a communities’ …

The Technicality Requirement, Patents Scope And Patentable Subject Matter In Australia, William Van Caenegem

William Van Caenegem

The technicality requirement confines patentable subject matter to practical processes and products. It excludes theoretical knowledge and methods of conducting services as such from patentability. In a post-industrial age, there may be good arguments to abandon this limiting requirement, because innovation has become highly scientific and because services now form such an important part of industrial activity. However, because the underlying effect of the requirement is to limit the scope of patent claims, it should arguably be retained: patents of excessively broad scope have a negative aggregate welfare effect. In any case, even within the constraints of technicality, courts applying …

Laboratories Of Democracy? Policy Innovation In Decentralized Governments, Brian D. Galle, Joseph K. Leahy

Brian D. Galle

Innovations in government produce positive externalities for other jurisdictions. Theory therefore predicts that local government will tend to produce a lower than optimal amount of innovation, as officials will prefer to free-ride on innovation by others. As Susan Rose-Ackerman observed in 1980, these two predictions, if true, tend to undermine arguments by proponents of federated government that decentralization will lead to many competing “laboratories of democracy.” In this paper, which is aimed primarily at legal academics, we review and critically assess nearly three decades of responses to Rose-Ackerman’s arguments, none of which have been discussed in depth in the legal …