Examining Intellectual Property Rights, Innovation and Technology Within the Caricom Single Market and Economy

Caricom Single Market and Economy (CSME) firms operate under various laws and policies on intellectual property rights (IPRs), innovation and technology. International analyses and rankings rate the CSME countries\u27 performance as poor in comparison with others at the same level of economic development. This results in negative impacts on the economic and social welfare of their communities. A paucity of data existed concerning the effects of policies on decisions by local firms to engage in innovation and technology activities. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to examine the effects of policies on IPRs, innovation, and technology on firms in select CSME countries. The questions addressed how IPRs policies affect the choices of innovation activities by firms, and what differences in IPRs policies in Guyana, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica, influence the decisions by firms to invest in innovation and technologies. Landes and Posner\u27s utilitarian exposition that IPRs should be based on the maximization of social welfare provided the theoretical framework for the study. Various policy papers, firm studies, study reports, and legislation from government and international agencies were analyzed using 4 levels of inductive coding. Findings included a lack of clear IPRs policies, high levels of innovation where policies were weakest, and a general reluctance by firms in the countries to invest in innovation and technology. Further study of the sociological and cultural aspects of IPRs policies, and how they affect innovation in CSME is recommended. This study can help effect social change in the CSME by informing policies that maximize social welfare through innovation and technology

A Domestic Right of Return?: Race, Rights, and Residency in New Orleans in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina

This article begins with a critical account of what occurred in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. This critique serves as the backdrop for a discussion of whether there are international laws or norms that give poor, black Katrina victims the right to return to and resettle in New Orleans. In framing this discussion, this article first briefly explores some of the housing deprivations suffered by Katrina survivors that have led to widespread displacement and dispossession. The article then discusses two of the chief barriers to the return of poor blacks to New Orleans: the broad perception of a race-crime nexus and the general effect of the imposition of outsider status on poor, black people by dominant groups. Finally, the article explores the international law concept of the right of return and its expression as a domestic, internal norm via standards addressing internally displaced persons, and considers how such a domestic right of return might be applicable to the Katrina victims

The Merging of Ornamentation, Artistic Competence, and Social Structure in the Portraiture oI Jeremiah Theus in Charleston, South Carolina

Previous research into the art of Jeremiah Theus has often left much to be desired. A common choice of historians is to discuss how he differs from artists of his time, or discuss him solely in the context of other artists. However, it is important to study Theus within his own framework. A study of his particular location, time period, family history, the subjects he elected to portray and the way he chose to portray them all help in understanding and recognizing what makes Theus unique as an artist. This thesis aims not only to address the research undertaken by previous scholars but also strives to approach the artist from a more subjective direction. Hopefully, this will discourage future scholars from rapidly attributing the primitive works of eighteenth century Charleston to Theus and from unjustly assuming more skillful works as being too advanced to belong to his oeuvre

(Un)Common Law and the Female Body

A dissonance frequently exists between explicit feminist approaches to law and the realities of a common law system that has often ignored and even at times exacerbated women’s legal disabilities. In The Common Law Inside the Fe-male Body, Anita Bernstein mounts a challenge to this story of division. There is, and has long been, she asserts, a substantial interrelation between the common law and feminist jurisprudential approaches to law. But Bernstein’s central argument, far from disrupting broad understandings of the common law, is in keeping with a claim that other legal scholars have long asserted: decisions according to precedent, and other aspects of the common law ideal, do not demand only certain narrow out-comes, or the expression of outcomes in specific language. Bernstein’s work suggests that the common law has always offered liberatory potential for women, and this potential grows from longstanding common jurisprudential attributes and understandings, not new or uncommon attributes

Review of \u3cem\u3eNegotiating Justice: Progressive Lawyering, Low Income Clients, and the Quest for Social Change.\u3c/em\u3e Corey S. Shdaimah. Reviewed by Lolita Buckner Inniss.

Book review of Corey S. Shdaimah, Negotiating Justice: Progressive Lawyering, Low Income Clients, and the Quest for Social Change. New York University Press, 2009. $45.00 hardcover

Bridging the Great Divide--A Response to Linda Greenhouse and Reva B. Siegel\u27s Before (and After) Roe v. Wade: New Questions about Backlash

This essay discusses the history of Roe v. Wade as recently addressed by Linda Greenhouse and Reva B. Siegel. Going beyond their assertions, I suggest that an additional, more encompassing inquiry focuses on what factors are implicated in the politics of abortion and how these factors relate to larger social, political, and cultural conflicts both before and after Roe. By naming party politics and the Catholic Church, Greenhouse and Siegel posit two crucial elements that shaped the abortion debate. I assert, however, that what is not discussed in their Article is the way numerous other factors have figured into the debate, race and class being two of the most salient. Race, class, and abortion have interacted in complex and numerous ways throughout United States history. While this interaction in some respects can be described via a linear, historical approach, it is not fully explicated by a single dichotomous before/after analysis centered on Roe. Instead, race, class, and abortion are constantly interacting, sometimes co-constructed, constituent parts of a much greater social, cultural, and political conversation in the United States. I suggest that if national party politics and the Catholic Church are important aspects of the development of the United States narrative on abortion, then race and class are telling and even compelling subtexts in that narrative. Giving attention to these subtextual strands may offer valuable additional insights

Other Spaces in Legal Pedagogy

There is an increasing focus upon the material and metaphoric spatial dimensions of various academic disciplines, including law. This essay considers the spatial dimensions of legal pedagogy, focusing on Critical Race Theory (CRT). The essay first explains the critical program in law and how CRT grows out of it. The essay then suggests that the critical program, and especially CRT, is as much a human geographic or spatial construct as it is a social, political or historic one, and briefly describes the nature of human geography and legal geography. It next considers how metaphors for understanding CRT\u27s position in legal pedagogy are found in some of Foucault\u27s work on geography. In Des Espaces Autres ( Other Spaces ), Foucault argues that there are three distinct social spaces in society: real spaces, utopias, and heterotopias. What unites them, Foucault suggests, is a space that includes elements of all of these spaces, a space that he calls the mirror. Applying this frame, this essay posits that CRT, both the explicit courses on the topic and the discipline itself, should be re-mapped , that is, barriers to its inclusion in the broader legal pedagogy should be eliminated. In this way, CRT can function as a Foucauldian mirror rather than a heterotopia in legal pedagogy