Comment to the SEC in Support of the Enhanced Disclosure of Patent and Technology License Information

Intangible assets like IP constitute a large share of the value of firms, and the US economy generally. Accurate information on the intellectual property (IP) holdings and transactions of publicly-traded firms facilitates price discovery in the market and reduces transaction costs. While public understanding of the innovation economy has been expanded by a large stream of empirical research using patent data, and more recently trademark information this research is only as good as the accuracy and completeness of the data it builds upon. In contrast with information about patents and trademarks, good information about IP licensing is much less publicly available. Although IP royalties provide large in-bound trade flows to the United States, remarkably little is known about the economic realities of IP transactions. But not only are licensing royalties economically impactful, but building a better understanding of how markets for technology operate in a modern, innovation economy is important for the transparency of markets, and to the public and policy-makers. Open data on innovation is currently siloed, fragmented, and unfedeRrarated across a number of repositories (some electronic and others physical) including the Administrative Office of the Courts, Secretary of State Offices, Copyright Office, IRS, USPTO, SEC, FDA, NSF, SBA and others, raising search and discovery costs and undermining the goals of open data. Data on “comparables” tend to be thin in the industry, a situation that may offer a sub-optimal market environment for startup firms: these young entities often rely on selling intangibles, but have low bargaining power, and limited resources to invest in search and price discovery. Disclosures of material licenses and intellectual property information to the SEC addresses a number of existing gaps, with the potential to play an expanded role. In fact, IP license information is not widely available to the public through any other federal agency, even in cases where the IP was federally funded. Thus the IP license information available through the SEC is an invaluable resource to the public. One major limitation with the existing SEC licensing information, however, is that it is often difficult to find and manipulate. An impediment arises since the data are not tagged or designed to be easily combined with other information sources. One of us, for example, has sought to determine which firms have SEC-registered patent licenses over a period of time for the purpose of establishing a public database of licenses obtained through FOIA requests. However, there is no straightforward way for the public to search for this information, in the SEC record or otherwise. The overall thrust of our comments is to commend the SEC on the valuable disclosures its requirements encourage and to recommend preserving and augmenting, rather than diminishing them, in order to 1) produce more useful data and 2) reduce the costs of discovering and using existing data disclosed to the SEC. In many cases, an SEC requirement will not require reporting entities to create new information (e.g., when disclosing patents or licenses) but it will greatly reduce the costs to third parties of searching for this information

Reopening the Emmett Till Case: Lessons and Challenges for Critical Race Practice

As part of the symposium panel on Re- Trying Racial Injustices, I devote this Essay to an expansion of themes addressed in my earlier work on the reopening of civil rights era prosecutions. I draw upon this work, as well as upon the insights of my co-panelists Anthony Alfieri and Sherrilyn Ifill, to examine the reopening of the Emmett Till case and its critical race practice possibilities. In this Essay, I consider other aspects of these cleansing moments. Are they illusory? Do they provide a misleading sense of closure at the expense of the ongoing hard work of racial justice that leads up to -and must proceed from-those moments? What lessons or teaching moments might these cases create for critical race lawyers in their ongoing social justice work? In notable respects, the impetus to reopen long-dormant cases shares with critical legal theory a justified skepticism of the construct of finality and an idealistic vision of the possibilities for ultimate justice. Procedural and substantive bulwarks of finality may be necessary in a legalistic sense, but they do not signify closure or justice, particularly when structural inequality persists. Reopening, with its promise of restorative justice through racial healing and reconciliation, has the potential to provide the closure that mere finality lacks, but only if that restorative justice is authentic and far-reaching. This Essay proceeds to address the above concerns as follows. In Part I, I discuss the Emmett Till case in greater detail, with brief contextual reference to two historical eras that frame it chronologically and thematically: lynching in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, and the civil rights movement of the mid-to late1950s. In Part II, I focus on the significance of the 2004 Till case reopening and lessons that it may offer for critical race practice. These lessons dovetail with recurrent questions in the literature of critical race theory and offer suggestions for fostering the integration of theory and practice (race praxis). Finally, I conclude that the Till case and other similar reopenings will yield transcendent meaning and closure only if a self-reflective approach propels them past the transitory cleansing moments toward a deeper commitment to restorative justice

Embryonic Stem Cell Research as an Ethical Issue: On the Emptiness of Symbolic Value

The debate over human embryonic stem cell research-scientific and clinical prospects as well as ethical implications-became front-page news only after two teams of university researchers reported in November 1998 that they had isolated and cultured human pluripotent stem cells. The discovery caused a flurry of excitement among patients and researchers and drew attention from President Clinton, who instructed the National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC) to conduct a thorough review of the issues associated with. .. human stem cell research, balancing all medical and ethical issues.

The ADVANCE Democracy Act and the Future of United States Democracy Promotion Efforts

This article addresses whether and to what extent the Obama administration should continue the Bush administration policies relating to democracy promotion. The focus of the article is on the ADVANCE Act of 2007, a legislative enactment that institutionalized democracy promotion in the State Department. After explicating the key provisions of this Act, as well as their implementation status, the article addresses key critiques leveled at democracy promotion, as well as areas where the Obama administration can expand on what has been accomplished thus far in this field. In the end, democracy promotion should continue to be an integral component of the United States\u27\u27 foreign policy, and the Obama administration is uniquely placed to ensure the efficacy of such efforters in the near-term. Whether the administration can add such a broadly conceived endeavor to its current plate is another, unaddressed, issue

Where Should Europe’s Investment Path Lead?: Reflections on August Reinisch, “Quo Vadis Europe?”

Relative to the past policies of its Member States, will the European Union’s new comprehensive international investment policy constitute a step forward, a step backward, or a perpetuation of the status quo? Professor Reinisch’s contribution to this volume opens a wide window on the current state of the debate. His cogent analysis suggests that, at present, all three possibilities remain live ones, although some basic contours of a likely trajectory are beginning to take shape. I use his musings as a springboard to investigate two questions which follow naturally from his. That is, in view of Professor Reinisch’s response to the question “where are you going, Europe?” I ask, first, where should European investment policy go next, and second, who should decide? These normative questions are pressing and require thoughtful answers developed through inter-institutional dialogue. If the new EU-wide investment policy is to succeed, their resolution must take precedence over the more mundane, technical matters that have consumed the bulk of scholarly attention so far

Jihad re-examined: Islamic law and international law

The Arabic term jihad, which means striving, endeavouring, and struggling, has widely been conceptualised to include ‘armed struggle’ as one of the forms of jihad. Jihad has been used by political leaders in some Islamic States or increasingly by non-State actors either to justify the use of force (e.g. Al-Qaeda’s 1996 ‘Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places’, and the 1998 World Islamic Front pronouncement signed by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, among others, declared ‘jihad against Jews and Crusaders’) or to condemn the use of force as unlawful. Jihad has inspired many recent armed conflicts including that of the resistance to the US war against Afghanistan in 2001, the US-UK invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, the struggle for self-determination in Kashmir since 1947, the Palestinian struggle for reclaiming land from Israel since 1948 and the on-going armed conflict in Somalia. In recent times, the application of jihad to justify the use of force or its condemnation has raised questions regarding the compatibility of the jihad concept as conceptualised in Islamic law or by leaders of some Muslim groups with modern norms of international law as enunciated in the United Nations Charter. This article seeks to examine the evolving concept of jihad in Islamic law, its contemporary application and its compatibility with international law, in particular the relationship between jihad, freedom of religion/belief, and the prohibition on the use of force

Guns and Membership in the American Polity

This Article elucidates the symbolic importance of citizenship distinctions in gun rights, contemplating how the American polity views itself and outsiders, and discussing the dynamics of intergroup and interpersonal interactions in the American Republican tradition

Judging Vanessa: Norm Setting and Deviance in the Law of Motherhood

This article, by an author who has devoted over a decade to the study of women whom the law deems bad mothers, undertakes a more probing consideration of what truly separates the deviant mother from the good mother. In this article, she exposes the flaws in a binary classification of mothers as either good or bad. She accomplishes this task by juxtaposing the stories, both legal and personal, of Vanessa, a woman whom society has judged to be a bad mother, and the author, a mother most in society would view as good. In the end, the author not only offers alternative explanations for the death of Vanessa\u27s child, but also a broader moral lens through which to judge Vanessa and perhaps mothers in general