Intellectual Property

Scholarly works by Associate Dean and Professor Madhavi Sunder and Professor Peter Lee are among the most-cited Intellectual Property law articles, according to a new entry on the blog Written Description.

Professor Peter Lee and Associate Dean and Professor Madhavi Sunder

Faculty members at UC Davis School of Law publish truly unique scholarship that advances the legal profession. You can view their scholarly works via the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) Legal Scholarship Network. An archive can be found on this web page.

What follows here is the most recent collection of papers:

Copyright law both incentivizes creative works, such as the bestselling J.K. Rowling "Harry Potter" series, and also governs what fans can do with the works that they grow to love and know so well. Are the handmade Harry Potter-inspired jewelry, t-shirts, and Hogwarts robes for sale on the popular website ETSY.com illegal? What about a Girls Scouts Harry Potter-themed summer camp? What is ETSY's liability for the copyright infringement of the do-it-yourself fan-artists who share and sell their wares on the site?

At UC Davis School of Law, students and faculty work together to organize some amazing events. 

Professor Peter Lee, a leading scholar of patent law, has a new article that will be published in the Michigan Law Review next year. The article is titled "The Supreme Assimilation of Patent Law," and it presents a descriptive theory of Supreme Court patent jurisprudence.

Here is the abstract:

Faculty members at UC Davis School of Law publish truly unique scholarship that advances the legal profession. You can view their scholarly works via the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) Legal Scholarship Network. An archive can be found on this web page.

What follows here is the most recent collection of papers:

Yale University Press has just published The Electronic Silk Road: How the Web Binds the World Together in Commerce. The book has been hailed as a "tour de force" by leading trade economist Jagdish Bhagwati of Columbia University, a "must read" by Senator Chris Coons, and "engaging" and "important" by Ricardo Ramírez-Hernández, Chair of the Appellate Body, World Trade Organization.

The hardcover is available from Amazon here, as is a Kindle version.

The intellectual property world is in an uproar about Judge Richard Posner’s salvo this month against United States patent law. In a piece in The Atlantic, Judge Posner argues that there are too many patents in America. He observes that patents can hamper innovation, just as they can incentivize it, and that they may be unnecessary to induce innovation in many industries.

Congratulations to Professor Rose Cuison Villazor, an exciting new addition to the King Hall faculty, on her just-released book titled Loving v. Virginia in a Post-Racial World: Rethinking Race, Sex, and Marriage.

Most scholarship on intellectual property considers this law from the standpoint of law and economics. Under this conventional wisdom, intellectual property is simply a tool for promoting innovative products, from iPods to R2D2. In this highly original book Madhavi Sunder calls for a richer understanding of intellectual property law’s effects on social and cultural life. Intellectual property does more than incentivize the production of more goods. This law fundamentally affects the ability of citizens to live a good life.