The Constitution gives Congress the power to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." The patent system embodies this power, but does it fulfill its essential purpose? This Note explores the scope of the exclusive rights of patents, arguing that in many circumstances the exclusive...

This article, written for the Eighth Annual Legal Scholarship Symposium celebrating the work of Richard A. Epstein, assesses Epstein’s advocacy of a default rule for patent conveyances. The article first explains how nineteenth-century patent doctrine supports Epstein’s argument for a...

The literature applying the economics of product differentiation to intellectual property has been called the most important development in the economic analysis of IP in years. Relaxing the assumption that products are homogeneous yields new insights by explaining persistent features of IP...

This article was prepared as a contribution to the Chapman Law Review's symposium on “Libertarian Legal Theory.” While libertarian legal theory and law and economics share many affinities there are places in which both the method of the common law and the substantive rules of the common law...

Settlements of patent litigation between branded and generic drug makers that include a promise by the generic maker to stay out of the market, sometimes in exchange for a ‘reverse' payment, increase the profits of drug makers at the expense of consumers. Some commentators argue that drug...

Harold Demsetz once claimed that 'economics has no antitrust relevant theory of competition.' Demsetz offered this provocative statement as an introduction to an economic concept with critical implications for the antitrust enterprise: the multi-dimensional nature of competition. Competition...

This essay is the introduction to a forthcoming volume entitled, Regulating Innovation: Competition Policy and Patent Law Under Uncertainty (Cambridge U. Press 2009 forthcoming). In addition to introducing all of the papers in the volume, this essay introduces the organizing themes of the...

Traditionally patents are seen as the gold standard for intellectual property protection. But, in line with empirical findings that secrecy is considered more important for appropriating returns, recent theories predict that firms keep their most important inventions secret. This article...

Patents have long been regarded as the 'gold standard' of intellectual property protection. In "Little patents and big secrets: managing intellectual property", Anton and Yao (2004) call this traditional view into question by finding that firms keep their most important innovations secret. This...