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In IP scholarship, patents are commonly understood as more efficient than other approaches to innovation policy. Their primary ostensible advantage is allocative: as a form of property rights, patents act as a conduit between market signals and potential innovators, ostensibh' guiding investment toward inventions with the most social value. Existing accounts recognize that, in practice, signals of social value that patents facilitate may be attenuated because of, for example, transaction costs and limits on the scope and length of patent rights. We show here, however, a different problem with the conventional allocative account. The appropriability mechanism patents rely on, namely excludability, operates in asymmetrical ways for different kinds of information goods. While scholars have noted that patent systems fail to create goods whose value is difficult to appropriate in consumer markets, this fact has not been fully appreciated in the literature, nor have its implications for the standard justification for patents. Through derailed examples in the health context we show that some kinds of information goods will be much more difficult to exclude than others. Importantly, there is no reason to expect that the ease of exclusion will be correlated with social value. The analytic point that emerges is generalizable: patents themselves can have distortive effects, stemming from structural features of exclusion rights. Unlike the problem of attenuation, the problem of asymmetric nonexcludability cannot be resolved by increasing patent scope or length. Because excludability is variabk along a continuum, property rights in information, even if formally perfected, and even assuming away conventional transaction costs, will create asymmetrical demand for different kinds of information goods. This argument provides an important new justification for alternatives to patents such as government funding and gives us new insights about how to allocate such funding. It also reinforces the need for a comparative institutional approach to innovation policy, and for incorporating into our debates currently unrecognized implications that patents may have for values such as privacy and free speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intellectual property law was once an arcane subject. Today it is at the center of some of the most highly charged political contests of our time. In recent years, college students, subsistence farmers, AIDS activists, genomic scientists, and free-software programmers have mobilized to challenge the contours of intellectual property (IP) law. Very recently, some from these groups have begun to develop a shared critique under the umbrella of "access to knowledge" (A2K). Existing accounts of the political economy of the field of IP have suggested that such a mobilization was unlikely. This Article takes the emergence of the A2K mobilization as an opportunity to develop a richer and less deterministic account of the contemporary politics of IP. It draws upon "frame mobilization" literature, which illuminates the role that acts of interpretation play in instigating, promoting, and legitimating collective action. The frame- analytic perspective teaches that before a group can act it must develop an account of its interests and theorize how to advance these interests. These acts of interpretation are both socially mediated and contingent. Ideas can be a resource for those engaged in mobilization, but one that is not fully in their control. Frames thus can lay the scaffolding for a countermovement even as they pave the way for a movement's success. Law is a key location for framing conflicts because it provides groups with symbolic resources for framing, and because groups struggle within the field of law to gain control over law's normative and instrumental benefits. Law thus exerts a gravitational pull on framing processes. Engagement with law can influence a group's architecture, discourse, and strategies, and can also create areas of overlapping agreement and- as importantly - a language of common disagreement between opposing groups. The Article closes by suggesting some implications of this point, which should be of interest to those who design legal institutions and who engage in social mobilization. Most intriguing, perhaps, is the role it suggests that law may play in the creation of global publics and polities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deals with same-sex privacy and the limits of anti-discrimination law in the U.S. Discussion on sex-based bona fide occupational qualification (BFOQ); Assessment of the failure of same-sex privacy doctrine to meet the stringent requirements established for BFOQ; Examination of reasoning which justifies the exclusion of same-sex privacy norms from gender norms.

Discusses the attempt of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to bring an end to the conflict between the military and law schools through the Solomon Amendment passed by U.S. Congress in 1994. Ways to criticize both the Solomon Amendment and the DoD enforcement campaign; Emphasis on education; View of modern university founder Wilhelm von Humboldt on universities.

We live in a time of interrelated crises. Economic inequality and precarity, and crises of democracy, climate change, and more raise significant challenges for legal scholarship and thought. "Neoliberal" premises undergird many fields of law and have helped authorize policies and practices that reaffirm the inequities of the current era. In particular, market efficiency, neutrality, and formal equality have rendered key kinds of power invisible, and generated a skepticism of democratic politics. The result of these presumptions is what we call the "Twentieth-Century Synthesis": a pervasive view of law that encases "the market" from claims of justice and conceals it from analyses of power. This Feature offers a framework for identifying and critiquing the Twentieth-Century Synthesis. This is also a framework for a new "law-and-political-economy approach" to legal scholarship. We hope to help amplify and catalyze scholarship and pedagogy that place themes of power, equality, and democracy at the center of legal scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]