Professor Lee Presents Paper at University of Iowa Faculty Workshop

Professor Peter Lee recently presented a work-in-progress at a faculty workshop at the University of Iowa School of Law. The paper, “Patent Law’s Externality Asymmetry,” explores patent law’s differential treatment of positive and negative externalities from technological innovation. Patents allow inventors to internalize some of the positive externalities of their inventions, thus maintaining incentives to invent. However, patents do very little to internalize the negative externalities of new technologies. In this manner, patents operate very differently from property rights in land, which internalize negative externalities from land use in several ways.

The paper illustrates patent law’s externality asymmetry by examining several patented technologies that can produce substantial harms, such as Facebook’s filter bubble, autonomous vehicles, and AI-based predictive policing systems. The paper will be published in the Cardozo Law Review next year.

Professor Lee's scholarly work addresses the intersection of science and society, particularly exploring the patent system's impact on scientific and technological progress.