This essay briefly provides the history behind the rejection by law professors of peer review as a professional standard and then details the scholarly harm and moral hazard inherent in the current system of student-selected articles. It argues that after a five-year phase-in period articles in...

This chapter in an upcoming book on the law and economics of copyright provides a basic primer on the economics of the public domain, discussing extant models and references, including new graphs comparing used book and new book markets to represent market distortions enabled by copyright protection

Research on the effect of copyright term extension in the United States demonstrates the negative effect of protection on the availability of new bound editions, ebooks, and audiobook editions of older works. Among the most popular titles, copyright protection also is associated strongly with...

Although much ink has been spilled over the decision of the Supreme Court in eBay v. Mercexchange to modify the test for equitable relief in patent cases and to nullify the long-standing presumption that victims of infringement are always entitled to permanent injunctions, an obvious point is...

Contrary to popular belief, the twentieth century was a good one for commercial apple varietal diversity. As measured by availability in commercial nursery catalogs, significant gains were made in both absolute number of apple varieties and the available number of pre-1900 historic varieties. In...

The intellectual property system does not seem to drive the rate of innovation in the market for vegetable varieties. Drawing on a unique data set of all plant patents, plant variety protection certificates, and utility patents among 42 vegetable varieties, this short paper examines the...

According to the conventional wisdom, the twentieth century was a disaster of monumental proportions for vegetable crop diversity. The conventional wisdom is wrong. Our study of 2004 commercial seed catalogs shows twice as many 1903 crop varieties surviving as previously reported in the iconic...

In a world of zero transaction costs, one should observe optimal invention and innovation. As long as a system of enforceable contracts were in place, firms with inventive capacity and firms requiring inventions would negotiate for the optimal production of new creations. With adequate...

Some economists assert that as valuable works transition from copyrighted status and fall into the public domain they will be underexploited and their value dissipated. Others insist instead that without an owner to control their use, valuable public domain works will be overexploited or...