The normative justifications for intellectual property (“IP”) law are richly debated. Some policymakers and experts argue that intellectual property should serve utilitarian goals, while others contend that the law should seek to protect natural rights or expressive ends. Such debates have...

For decades the prevailing view in the United States and many Western countries has been that China does not appropriately respect intellectual property rights. These beliefs lie at the heart of President Donald Trump's current trade war with China. Despite substantial geopolitical debate over...

Most international intellectual property debates ignore the fundamental question of how to optimize the global environment for innovation, focusing instead on whether a particular policy benefits or harms a particular country. The cost of this misplaced focus is significant as states fight...

The challenge of achieving socially optimal incentives for innovation in public goods faces twin market failures: a market failure to adequately promote public goods invention and a market failure to implement innovative public goods once developed. Though innovation in private goods sometimes...

A range of emerging technologies, including biotechnology, nanotechnology, and synthetic biology, are expected to transform society. Handling the development and regulation of these promising technologies is a daunting task as the risks presented will not be understood until the technologies are...

The dominant current perception in patent law is that the core requirement of nonobviousness is applied too leniently, resulting in a proliferation of patents on trivial inventions that actually retard technological innovation in the long run. This Article reveals that the common wisdom is only...

This Article presents an original empirical methodology to identify which patent laws will best promote optimal incentives to innovate for society. Vociferous debates over patent reform pit the United States’ largest innovation industries against each other in a dispute concerning whether...

The conventional explanation for controversy over climate change emphasizes impediments to public understanding: Limited popular knowledge of science, the inability of ordinary citizens to assess technical information, and the resulting widespread use of unreliable cognitive heuristics to assess...

This Article analyzes two significant errors of omission in the Supreme Court's recent patent decision, KSR v. Teleflex. First, though KSR represents the Court's eighth decision on nonobviousness since the standard was enacted in 1952, the Court still has never defined what this core patent...

Experts expect nanotechnology to transform society, revolutionizing fields as diverse as health care, energy, and the environment. Though a number of nanotechnology products are already on the market, the major developments are yet to come, and the nascent stage of this technology combined with...