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Billion-dollar blueprints: A new way of understanding the high but elusive worth of intellectual property
No full textA group of 65 people have each achieved inventions worth $1b
From Productivity to Firm Growth
Get PDFIt is widely held that more productive firms grow faster, thus reallocating resources and raising aggregate productivity. Yet little empirical research identifies the features of the mechanisms affecting this process. This paper develops and tests a general model encompassing several mechanisms used to overcome informational frictions to growth. We find that firm size, productivity dispersion, and large firm investments in intangibles are all significantly related to changes in firm growth in response to productivity. These factors can account for much of the decline in the response to productivity since 2000 (Decker et al. 2020). Also, industry concentration is directly related to aggregate productivity growth
The Expressive Fourth Amendment
Get PDFAfter the eight-minute and forty-six second video of George Floyd’s murder went viral, cities across the United States erupted in mass protests with people outraged by the death of yet another Black person at the hands of police. The streets were flooded for months with activists and community members of all races marching, screaming, and demonstrating against police brutality and for racial justice. Police—like warriors against enemy forces—confronted overwhelmingly peaceful protesters with militarized violence and force. Ultimately, racial justice protesters and members of the media brought lawsuits under section 1983 of the Civil Rights Act in the district courts of Minneapolis, Dallas, Oakland, Seattle, Portland, Denver, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Indianapolis, claiming extreme violence and unlawful and abusive use of less lethal weapons by police during protests. The first Part of this Article provides a recent history of this police brutality against racial justice activists in the George Floyd protests. The second Part of this Article reviews circuit court opinions in protest cases from the last three decades and district court injunctions from the George Floyd protest litigation to analyze how courts currently evaluate, in section 1983 Actions, the Fourth Amendment reasonableness of police force pursuant to Graham v. Connor. This Part demonstrates that in their Fourth Amendment reasonableness calculus, courts discount plaintiffs’ involvement in valuable politically expressive conduct. The third Part of this Article argues that the Fourth Amendment mandates courts evaluate the reasonableness of protest policing in light of freedom of expression which means they must positively weigh plaintiffs’ expressive protest activity. This reframing of reasonableness is supported by historical evidence of the Framers’ intent and Supreme Court jurisprudence on searches of books, papers, and other expressive materials when such items arguably deserve First Amendment protection. The fourth Part of this Article discusses the difference an expression-specific Fourth Amendment—the expressive Fourth Amendment—reasonableness test would have made in one of the circuit protest cases
Are Constitutional Courts Civic Educative Institutions? If So, What Do They Teach?
No full textThis volume addresses whether, how, and where laws (variously defined) teach values and shape moral character in late modern liberal societies. Each author recognizes the essential value of state law in fostering peace, security, health, education, charity, trade, democracy, constitutionalism, justice, and human rights, among many other moral goods. Each author also recognizes, however, the grave betrayals of law in supporting fascism, slavery, apartheid, genocide, persecution, violence, racism, and other forms of immorality and injustice. They thus call for state laws that set a basic civil morality of duty for society and for robust freedoms that protect private individuals and private groups to cultivate a higher morality of aspiration. With contributions by Rudiger Bittner, Brian Bix, Frank Brennan, Allen Calhoun, Robert F. Cochran, Jr., Kenneth John Crispin, Jean Bethke Elshtain, E. Allan Farnsworth, James E. Fleming, M. Cathleen Kaveny, Ute Mager, Linda C. McClain, Reid Mortensen, Patrick Parkinson, Thomas Pfeiffer, Robert Vosloo, Michael Welker, and John Witte, Jr
Epilogue: Symposium Pnina Lahav: Between Two Worlds
Get PDFThe epilogue by Pnina Lahav is a reflection on her life and a reaction to the articles in the symposium
New Ariz. Law Practice Rules May Jump-Start National Reform
No full textOn Jan. 1, 2021, a far-reaching reform of the practice of law took effect in Arizona, opening the sector up to nonlawyer participation. Given the global context of the reform and the general economic climate, we predict that other states will follow suit in coming years, profoundly transforming the American legal profession.The reform\u27s goal is to increase access to justice. We predict, however, that it will have both positive and negative additional consequences — for clients, the justice system, legal education and lawyers\u27 careers — and we explore some of those consequences below.The reform consists of two main prongs.The first is the elimination of Arizona\u27s prohibition on nonlawyers sharing in lawyers\u27 fees, holding an economic interest in a law firm, and participating in the management of law firms. In their stead, the Arizona Supreme Court put in place a robust regulatory framework for such nonlawyer participation, which can take place only through a new type of entity, an alternative business structure, or ABS.The second is the creation of a new licensed profession, called a legal paraprofessional, to provide limited legal services to the public, including representation in certain court proceedings.Over the past century, the legal profession has repeatedly considered and rejected such reforms. While no one denied that the reforms can provide lawyers with access to potentially unlimited pools of capital and introduce efficiencies that, if passed onto the clients, will increase access to justice, the reforms were also understood as a potential threat to the very foundation of the practice of law.By accepting active or passive investment, lawyers will be presented with a structural conflict between, on the one hand, their ethical obligations to their clients and to the courts and, on the other hand, their obligations to their investors
The Transient and the Permanent in Arbitration
Get PDFSeveral years ago, Jan Paulsson observed that Derek Roebuck might substitute for a time machine, providing a way for us to voyage backward with a guide to put everything in context. Indeed, the great Derek Roebuck, to whom we dedicate this set of essays, gave much of his professional life to making sure that by receiving a glimpse of dispute resolution in earlier times, we might have an opportunity better to understand the reality of present-day arbitration
Paying Americans to Take the Vaccine - Would it Help or Backfire?
Get PDFThis research investigates the extent to which financial incentives (conditional cash transfers) would induce Americans to opt for vaccination against COVID-19. We performed a randomized survey experiment with a representative sample of 1,000 American adults in December 2020. Respondents were asked whether they would opt for vaccination under one of three incentive conditions (1,500, or $2,000 financial incentive) or a no-incentive condition. We find that—without coupled financial incentives—only 58% of survey respondents would elect for vaccination. A coupled financial incentive yields an 8-percentage-point increase in vaccine uptake relative to this baseline. The size of the cash transfer does not dramatically affect uptake rates. However, incentive responses differ dramatically by demographic group. Republicans were less responsive to financial incentives than the general population. For Black and Latino Americans especially, very large financial incentives may be counter-productive
(Re)Framing Race in Civil Rights Lawyering
Get PDFA review of Henry Louis Gates, Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (Penguin Press, 2019). The Review proceeds in four parts. Part I parses Gates’s analysis of the rise of white supremacist ideology and the accompanying concept of the “Old Negro” during the Redemption era and the countervailing emergence of the concept of a “New Negro” culminating in the Harlem Renaissance. Part II examines the lawyering process as a rhetorical site for constructing racialized narratives and racially subordinating visions of client, group, and community identity through acts of representing, prosecuting, and defending people of color in civil rights, poverty law, and criminal cases. Part III evaluates the permissibility of racialized narratives and racially subordinating visions under what courts like to refer to as colorblind or race-neutral lawyering process traditions and legal ethics conventions, assessing their logic under naturalistic and necessitarian rationales borrowed from the science, literature, and symbolism of Jim Crow segregation excavated by Gates. A wide span of lawyers — criminal prosecutors and public defenders as well as civil rights and poverty lawyers — routinely craft such narratives and images in their work. Part IV puts forward an alternative set of race-conscious advocacy practices and ethics precepts infused by the antisubordination norms of racial dignity and equality garnered from the early black resistance movements documented by Gates for use in contemporary civil rights, poverty law, and criminal cases attacking legal, political, and economic systems of structural inequality
Women\u27s Spheres of Action
No full textIn a presentation for the Trollope Society, Professor Linda McClain discusses the anti heroine of The American Senator, Arabella Trefoil, and \u27Women\u27s Spheres of Action\u27.https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/law_presentations/1001/thumbnail.jp