43674 research outputs found
Sort by
Addressing the Next State Fiscal Crisis: Toward an Ex Ante Scheme of Federal Assistance to States in Fiscal Distress
Get PDFEvery several years, usually after a national recession, and also as a result of the C OVID 19 pandemic, states enter financial difficulties. These difficulties spur a debate, both in the political arena and in the academic literature, concerning the appropriate federal response. Some advocate for federal bailouts to rescue the distressed states, while others argue that the states need to deal with their troubles independently or with the help of state bankruptcy legislation. The Article explores the proper federal response to states’ fiscal fiscal crises.
The Article argues that the current (suggested) responses – state bankruptcy and ex-post discretionary federal bailout – are problematic solutions. On the one hand, a bankruptcy procedure is inadequate to deal with state economic crises, but on the other hand discretionary bailouts often come too late and create moral hazard and political agency concerns. Instead of these ex-post solutions, the Article suggests the adoption of an ex ante federal assistance scheme. This scheme employs automatic fiscal stabilizers and the Federal Reserve’s authority as a lender of last resort, in order to assist states to deal with economic downturns as they develop. It is designed to induce the recovery of the states’ and the national economies by enabling states to address their fiscal fiscal crises without implementing destructive contractionary measures
Overqualified and Underrepresented: Gender Inequality in Pharmaceutical Patent Law
Get PDFPharmaceutical patents represent some of the most valuable intellectual property assets in the world: they can be worth billions of dollars if courts uphold their validity and find them infringed. But, if invalidated, generic drug manufacturers can get to market earlier, generating billions of dollars of revenue for themselves and creating enormous savings for consumers. Accordingly, drug patents are the product of careful, high-cost prosecution and are associated with high-stakes, bet-the-company litigation.
But women lawyers are noticeably absent from pharmaceutical patent practice. This article reports an original empirical study finding that women comprise only one-third of the top pharmaceutical patent litigators and only one-quarter of lawyers who prosecute litigated pharmaceutical patents — numbers far below the share of women in the legal profession overall. The usual explanation for any lack of representation in patent practice is the “pipeline” problem — that is, an insufficient number of women in the technical fields underlying patent law. But our study finds little support for any pipeline problem. Indeed, recent studies indicate that more women law students have scientific undergraduate and graduate degrees than their male counterparts.
Interestingly, the gender gap among pharmaceutical patent lawyers does not carry over to public sector work. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is the one place where our study finds anything close to parity: 42.3% of pharmaceutical patent examiners are women and 57.7% are men. This finding adds to a nascent literature documenting vast disparities in gender representation in the private versus public sectors, both in patent law and in law practice more generally.
It also suggests that the lack of women doing patent law in private practice in the pharmaceutical field probably is not due to any pipeline problem; instead, it likely stems from structural inequalities that permeate the highest levels of corporate law firms. Those firms, as well as their pharmaceutical company clients, all say that diversity is important. But, as our study shows, there is a disconnect between rhetoric and reality. Fully solving structural inequality in law practice is a formidable task, but this article sketches a few ways in which firms and their clients could help create a patent bar that is more diverse and inclusive
Innovation’s Hidden Externalities
Get PDFWhen commentators discuss innovation’s externalities, they often classify them into one of two categories. On the positive externalities, or “spillovers” side, legal and economics scholars often speak of the benefits innovation confers on other innovators. Future innovators profit from past innovation as they “stand on the shoulders of giants” to develop progressively new and better innovation. Discussion of innovation’s negative externalities, on the other hand, has mainly focused on social harms not directly related to future innovation that particular advances impose on third parties—the classic example being pollution. Thus, the common understanding is that innovation’s spillovers positively impact innovation (among other things), while innovation’s negative externalities are only indirectly related to society’s collective capacity for further innovation, if at all. This Article challenges that view, arguing that innovation does impose negative externalities on contemporary and future innovators, thereby making it more difficult for them to innovate. It discusses three mechanisms by which these negative externalities arise. The first is through path dependencies. Path dependencies in innovation can limit the innovative potential of other innovators by effectively foreclosing particular areas of study or by directing innovation along less productive paths. A second mechanism by which innovation imposes negative externalities on other innovators is through the workings of social norms. Social norms that become entrenched in innovative communities can lead innovators to adopt sub-optimal research agendas and methodologies. Third, particular innovations may work on those who adopt them at a psychological level, changing their cognition and thought processes in ways that negatively impact their future ability to innovate. Uncovering innovation’s hidden externalities has implications for discussions of innovation policy. Currently, the conventional wisdom holds that innovation’s spillovers should be addressed through innovation subsidies, while innovation’s negative externalities can be addressed by taxing the externalities directly. Recognizing that innovation has both positive and negative externalities for contemporary and future innovators, however, challenges the view that the conversation about innovation subsidies (like intellectual property, tax breaks, grants, and prizes) should concern itself only with innovation’s spillovers, and not with its negative externalities
The Million-Dollar Diversity Docket
Get PDFCongress has always imposed an amount in controversy requirement for general diversity jurisdiction. Congress initially set the jurisdictional amount at 75,000 threshold. That requirement has been described as ensuring that the federal courts not become bogged down by “petty” or “insubstantial” state-law cases. Given that it has been twenty-five years since the last increase, we are probably overdue for another one. But to what amount? For what purpose? And with what effects on the size and composition of the diversity docket? What would happen if Congress raised the jurisdictional amount from the current 250,000? How many cases would that eliminate, and which ones? Would it affect some types of cases, or some types of litigants, more than others? And what if Congress took a much bolder step and raised the jurisdiction amount to 1 million? Using a novel hand-coded data set of pleadings in 2,900 cases, we predict the likely effect of increases to the jurisdictional amount at three levels: 500,000, and 1 million. Our analysis also shows that the jurisdictional amount is not a neutral throttle. Instead, different areas of law, different parts of the country, and different litigants are more affected by changes in the jurisdictional amount than others. Our findings provide new guidance for Congress to consult when evaluating proposed changes to the amount threshold. Informed by how increases to the jurisdictional amount affect both the size and composition of the diversity docket, Congress can determine whether proposed increases achieve legislative goals and serve or disserve jurisdictional policy. For scholars, our empirical work provides a new lens into the ongoing debates about the basic functions and functioning of the federal diversity docket
