The Search for an Author: Shakespeare and the Framers

QC 20141201</p

Open Source Innovation, Patent Injunctions, and the Public Interest

This Article explores the difficulties that high technology markets pose for patent law and, in particular, for patent injunctions. It then outlines the ways in which “open source innovation” is unusually vulnerable to patent injunctions. It argues that courts can recognize this vulnerability, and respond to the particular competitive and innovative benefits of open source innovation, by flexibly applying the Supreme Court’s ruling in eBay v. MercExchange. Having dealt with the lamentable failure of the International Trade Commission to exercise a similar flexibility in its own patent jurisprudence, despite statutory and constitutional provisions that counsel otherwise, the Article concludes with some recommendations for reform

Is Subjectivity Possible - the Post-Modern Subject in Legal Theory

This article puts forward a thesis and then attempts to prove (or at least to develop) that thesis in two related areas. The thesis is that legal theory in general, and critical legal theory in particular, has concentrated too much on critiques of objectivity, wrongly assuming that subjectivity was an unproblematic term. Subjectivity, like mortality, has seemed not only attainable but inevitable. It is objectivity which is presumed to be the problematic goal of our theories and our attempts at doctrinal interpretation. This article reverses the focus, concentrating on the construction of subjectivity in law and social theory... Having pointed out that critical theories focus mainly on the impossibility of reaching objectivity, I show that some of the same critiques can be turned on the construction of subjectivity as well. The parallelism is more than mere symmetry. Just as the concept of objectivity can be used to armour decisions or social practices, so theoretical results and ideological slant can be dictated by loading up the abstract subject of a political or economic theory with a particular set of drives, motivations, and ways of reasoning...I then turn to the legal subject around whom the law revolves and try to develop a sketchy history of the changing qualities which that subject has been believed to possess. I conclude that the ideas associated with postmodernism are a useful framework for understanding the subject in legal theory and in legal practice. In fact, bizarre as it may seem, the law already incorporates a more postmodern view of the subject than either economics or mainstream political theory

Intellectual Property Policy Online: A Young Person’s Guide

This is an edited version of a presentation to the Intellectual Property Online panel at the Harvard Conference on the Internet and Society, May 28-31, 1996. The panel was a reminder of both the importance of intellectual property and the dangers of legal insularity. Of approximately 400 panel attendees, 90% were not lawyers. Accordingly, the remarks that follow are an attempt to lay out the basics of intellectual property policy in a straighforward and non-technical manner. In other words, this is what non-lawyers should know (and what a number of government lawyers seem to have forgotten) about intellectual property policy on the Internet. The legal analysis which underlies this discussion is set out in the Appendix

The creep behavior of simple structures with a stress range-dependent constitutive model

High temperature design remains an issue for many components in a variety of industries. Although finite element analysis for creep is now an accessible tool, most analyses outside the research domain use long standing and very simple constitutive models - in particular based on a power law representation. However, for many years it has been known that a range of materials exhibit different behavours at low and moderate stress levels. Recently studies of the behaviour of high temperature structures with such a stress range dependent constitutive model have begun to emerge. The aim of this paper is to examine further the detailed behaviour of simple structures with a modified power law constitutive model in order to instigate a deeper understanding of such a constitutive model's effect on stress and deformation and the implications for high temperature design. The structures examined are elementary - a beam in bending and a pressurized thick cylinder - but have long been used to demonstrate the basic characteristics of nonlinear creep