Oocyte cryopreservation as an adjunct to the assisted reproductive technologies

The document attached has been archived with permission from the editor of the Medical Journal of Australia. An external link to the publisher’s copy is included. See page 2 of PDF for this item.Keith L Harrison, Michelle T Lane, Jeremy C Osborn, Christine A Kirby, Regan Jeffrey, John H Esler and David Mollo

Privacy, Copyright, and Letters

The focus of this Essay is the privacy of letters – the written manifestations of thoughts, intents, and the recollections of facts directed to a person or a narrowly defined audience. The importance of this privacy is captured in the novel Atonement by Ian McEwan and in the film based on the novel. The fulcrum from which the action springs is a letter that is read by someone to whom it was not addressed. The result is literally life-changing, even disastrous for a number of characters. One person dies, two people seemingly meant for each other are torn apart and a family left in shambles. This example is, of course, drawn from fiction but there is no doubt that it is a case of art imitating life. It is hard to imagine someone who has not been affected in one way or another by the reading of a message by someone for whom it was not intended. This Essay makes the case for life time protection of letters by invoking privacy interests and ending copyright protection

Regulation, Deregulation, and Happiness

Happiness, in general, is in many respects the topic du jour. A great deal of theoretical and empirical work has been devoted to dissecting it. Studies of happiness have crossed over to law, and the result is an addition to the long list of the list of “law and” interdisciplinary areas. In fact, in 2010, Eric Posner and Matthew Alder presented an excellent book of readings the title of which is Law and Happiness. Peter Henry Huang has written the definitive survey of law and happiness literature. My own writing has reflected on the promise of happiness research and the difficulties of implementing its teachings. Most of the interdisciplinary work evaluates the potential impact of happiness on policy or programs. For example, in response to evidence that hosting large scale sports events like the Olympics or the Super Bowl may not be unqualified economic successes, work is now being conducted to assess the impact of those events on happiness. The teachings of happiness scholarship have yet to be applied to the traditional rationales for business regulation and the issue of how regulation could be altered, if at all, by considerations of happiness. This is the topic to which most of what follows is devoted

The Messenger Model: Don\u27t Ask, Don\u27t Tell?

This article makes the case that the messenger model is either tacitly or inadvertently a don\u27t ask, don\u27t tell policy when it comes to competitor cooperation. In addition, this article presents an economic framework that explains how such a policy may benefit health care consumers. Finally, it is suggested that the don\u27t ask, don\u27t tell policy has created an area of per se legality that precludes an examination designed to distinguish consumer-benefiting practices from those that provide no benefit

Post-Tenure Scholarship and Its Implications

Periodically in the popular press and even in academic circles, the question arises of whether professors should be granted lifetime employment contracts based on a sample of four to six years of a probationary period. Further clouding the issue of how easily tenure should be granted is the question of what determines tenure. Is it a reward for past efforts or based on a forecast of future productivity? These concepts may seem like the same thing but they are not. Accordingly, the huge commitment of resources that occurs when tenure is granted paired with the Author\u27s observations of pre-tenure scholars prompted him to conduct an unscientific study

A Positive Externalities Approach to Copyright Law: Theory and Application

The basic goal of copyright law is, at a general level, fairly well understood, yet the law itself seems untethered to any consistent analytical approach designed to achieve that goal. This Article has two goals. The first is to explain in some detail what copyright law might look like if it reflected economic reasoning. The second is to put to the test the question of whether copyright law is as far out of sync with economic guidelines as White-Smith Music and Eldred suggest. In order to understand the economic approach and the inconsistency of copyright law, as well as the thesis of this article, it is necessary to understand the concepts of externalities and public goods. Externalities can be negative or positive. In the context of actions that impose costs on others, the key concept is negative externalities -- the harm to others resulting from the activity of another. When it comes to copyright, the key concept is positive externality -- the benefits to others resulting from the activity of another. The underlying thesis of this Article is that positive and negative externalities are complements, and it is important to treat them similarly. Legal scholarship tends to address negative externalities disproportionately -- in the interests of allocative efficiency. Allocative efficiency is not likely to be achieved, though, by only treating one side of the externality problem

Socioeconomics: Choice and Challenges

Jeffrey Harrison takes on the role of analyst, reviewing the papers as a whole and adding his own challenges to socioeconomics. He concludes that socioeconomics provides a framework that can be used in disparate ways for law professors of varying perspectives, but the challenge that remains is for it to become methodologically indispensable to rigorous analysis irrespective of ideology

After Forty Years of Antitrust Revision and \u3ci\u3eApple v. Pepper\u3c/i\u3e, What Now \u3ci\u3eIllinois Brick\u3c/i\u3e?

Nineteen seventy-seven was a paradigm-shifting year in antitrust law. Decisions by the Supreme Court greatly limited the type of parties who could successfully bring antitrust actions and what types of activities would violate the antitrust laws. First, in January of that year, the Court, in Brunswick v. Pueblo Bowl-O-Mat, ruled that to mount a case the plaintiff had to have suffered an antitrust injury. In other words, even if the antitrust laws were violated, the party raising the issue had to have suffered the type of harm the laws were designed to avoid. Then in a fourteen day span the Court decided Continental T. V., Inc. v. GTE Sylvania and Illinois Brick Co. v. Illinois. In Sylvania, the Court held that vertical restraints on distribution were to be assessed under the rule of reason as opposed to the per se standard. In so doing the Court adopted reasoning that would carry over to vertical restraints on prices and applied in the context of some horizontal restraint cases. In Illinois Brick, in a six to three decision, it held that indirect purchases could not recover from price fixing firms even if the higher prices were passed onto those purchasers by those purchasing directly from the price fixers. Of these opinions, Illinois Brick has little, if any, continuing justification. This has been true for some time but now that matter is more critical in the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision in Apple Inc. v. Pepper, which exposed after forty years, the indeterminacy of Illinois Brick

Piercing Pareto Superiority: Real People and the Obligations of Legal Theory

This essay has two purposes. The first is to demonstrate that the appearance of mutual assent and Pareto Superiority are weak bases for enforcing agreements. Pareto Superiority, as unassailable as it may seem, is paper-thin and frequently based on illusions and a normatively meaningless assessment of what it means to be better off. The approach here is one of piercing Pareto Superiority in order to examine the human factors that may determine whether an agreement occurs and its distributive consequences. Relative deprivation is the instrument used. The second purpose is to suggest that it is the obligation of legal theory to take greater account of the psychological and social factors that influence the process of agreement