In Graham v. John Deere, the Supreme Court explained that patent law’s nonobviousness doctrine is meant to restrict the award of patents only to “those inventions which would not be disclosed or devised but for the inducement of a patent.” This Article argues that this inducement standard, largely ignored in practice, should serve as the doctrinal polestar. Such an approach would provide a solid economic foundation for the patentability standard and would align patent law with the many other fields of regulatory law that currently apply economic analysis in determining the scope and content of regulation. The Article also offers several refinements to the inducement standard and explains how the patent office and courts could implement the inducement standard in an administrable way.
We live in a golden age of student surveillance. Some surveillance is old school: video cameras, school resource officers, and tip lines. Old-school...
This Article develops a new way of understanding the law in order to address contemporary debates about judicial practice and reform. The...
How should judges decide hard cases involving rights conflicts? Standard debates about this question are usually framed in jurisprudential terms...
This article argues that the fact that an action will compound a prior injustice counts as a reason against doing the action. I call this reason The...
At first blush, the debate between Stanley Fish and Ronald Dworkin that took place over the course of the 1980s and early 90s seems to have produced...
As the knowledge economy expanded and concerns about trade secret misappropriation mounted in the digital age, federal policymakers undertook efforts...
Across multiple national surveys sampling more than 12,000 people, we have found that a majority of Americans, more than 60 percent, consider false...
Given that no two acts, events, situations, and legal cases are identical, precedential constraint necessarily involves determining which two...
This chapter examines the intellectual and social contexts in which the American Law Institute (ALI) has operated and how they have influenced the...
Sometimes a police officer can only stop a fleeing suspect by striking or shooting him. When is it morally justified to use such force rather than let...
This short essay considers Benjamin Zipursky’s intriguing effort to identify a tradition of “American natural law theory” that links Benjamin Cardozo...
In the years since the publication of our book, How Constitutional Rights Matter, many scholars from around the world have engaged with our research...
Recent decades have seen a sharp rise in constitutional provisions regulating core aspects of democracy, including the rules about parties, voting...
Although Lon Fuller’s importance and reputation among those who practice general jurisprudence remains contested, it is clear that he remains a major...