Torts v. Technology: Accommodating Disruptive Innovation

James A. Henderson, Jr. Given that the American legal system supports markets that make technological advancement economically feasible and thus attractive to investors, it may be said that our law generally encourages the development of innovative, albeit sometimes unavoidably dangerous,…
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Professional Rights Speech

Timothy Zick. Some regulations of professional-client communications raise important, but so far largely overlooked, constitutional concerns. Three recent examples of professional speech regulation: restrictions on physician inquiries regarding firearms, “reparative” therapy bans, and compelled abortion disclosures, highlight an important intersection…
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Patent Markets: A Framework for Evaluation

Michael J. Burstein. Patents have become financial assets. They are valued like securities, traded like stocks, and modeled as options. Our discourse about patents increasingly draws from finance. Firms whose business models depend on patent assertion explain that they are…
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Patent Pledges

Jorge L. Contreras. An increasing number of firms are making public pledges to limit the enforcement of their patents. In doing so, they are entering a little-understood middle ground between the public domain and exclusive property rights. The best-known of…
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Against Design

Caryn Devins, Roger Koppl, Stuart Kauffman & Teppo Felin. Institutions and the incentives they create can be designed or redesigned to produce desired outcomes. But design does not work if social and economic dynamics are “creative.” If it is impossible to…
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