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The Gender Gap in Academic Patenting
Get PDFThe gender gap in academia has long been the focus of public discourse regarding the role of universities in promoting social values. In this study, we consider women’s participation in transferring knowledge from the academy to industry. A prominent model for such transfer is reflected in patent registration for inventions developed through scholarly research. And while academic patenting is a significant component of the professional activities of many faculty members, the extent to which women’s scientific discoveries are patented and commercialized has received relatively little attention.
The U.S. academy is a leader in science and a pioneer of technology transfer. This study analyzes the extent to which inventions by academic women are protected by university patents. Through analysis of inventors’ names, we ascertain the expected gender of inventors listed on applications filed by U.S. academic institutions. From this data, we report the extent to which a gender gap exists in patent application, grant rates, fields of research, and forward citations.
Our study yielded several key findings. First, we found a significant increase in the number of patent applications originating from universities from 2000 to 2015. We identified a similar increase in applications by inventor teams made up of only women, though these applications were granted at a lower rate and were cited less frequently than patents obtained by teams including men. We found differences in team composition, with women being much more likely to work alone than men. We also noted an interesting disparity in subject matter, with drugs and chemistry (especially molecular biology) dominating the technological fields of university applications. The Article concludes that while women increasingly participate in academic patenting, a significant gender gap persists. Our findings may serve as a springboard for further research on the reasons for the failure to achieve gender equality, as women’s representation in the academy continues to increase
Public Investment in Climate Resiliency: Lessons from the Law and Economics of Natural Disasters
Get PDFThis Article takes issue with an important claim in the public choice and climate disaster literature: that American political markets will not allow appropriate investments in disaster preparedness and prevention, even when those investments are cost-benefit bargains. The claim is significant because the costs of climate disasters in the twenty-first century are estimated to be in the trillions of dollars due to the presence of legacy greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Thus, even assuming a sustained, successful global campaign to limit future greenhouse gases, the ingredients for decades of droughts, wildfires, storms, and floods are already locked into the atmosphere. Yet, for fifteen years, public choice economists have modeled disaster politics as a political commons riddled with externalities that lead to tragic underinvestment in disaster preparedness and resiliency.
This Article is the first to offer a sustained critique of the public choice claim. It argues that the claim has both theoretical and empirical limitations. As importantly, resiliency faces challenges that the public choice claim masks. These include the possibility of other institutional constraints standing in the way of optimal resiliency investments, as well as the possibility of resiliency haves and have-nots: of wealthier communities even going on resiliency “binges” while poorer communities suffer disinvestment and decades of disasteraugmented poverty. The Article invites a new wave of scholarly attention to resiliency’s prospects
White Injury and Innocence: On the Legal Future of Antiracism Education
Get PDFIn the wake of the “racial reckoning” of 2020, antiracism education attracted intense attention and prompted renewed educator commitments to teach more explicitly about the function, operation, and harm of racism in the United States. The increased visibility of antiracism education engendered sustained critique and opposition, resulting in executive orders prohibiting its adoption in the federal government, the introduction or adoption of over sixty state-level bills attempting to control how race is taught in schools, and a round of lawsuits challenging antiracism education as racially discriminatory. Because antiracism so directly runs afoul of norms underlying American antidiscrimination law, including anticlassification, colorblindness, and white innocence, antiracism education is vulnerable to legal challenge in a way that precursors like multiculturalism were not. The vulnerability of antiracism education to constitutional censure is the most recent illustration of how far antidiscrimination law has gone not in undercutting, but further entrenching, racial hierarchy in the United States. The legislative, litigation, and curricular wars surrounding antiracism education also remind us that race is significant for reasons that go beyond materiality. Rather, legal and social discourse about racism shapes notions of racial injury and ultimately impedes efforts to respond to even the material consequences of enduring racial inequality. Tracking and analyzing the anti-antiracism legislation and lawsuits provides those who are willing to follow it a map both to where antidiscrimination law must be changed, and to where antiracism education is most needed
Revisiting Health Care Fraud in the Biden Administration
Get PDFAlthough not one of the Biden administration’s initial priorities, health care fraud inevitably will be a major concern. First, the federal government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic—including the disbursement of more than $175 billion in provider relief funds and the loosening of traditionally strict rules on Medicare reimbursement for telehealth services—has created new opportunities to divert health care funds for fraudulent purposes. Second, President Joseph Biden took office in the midst of the incomplete transition from volume-based to value-based payment in the federal health care programs, which will allow fraud to flourish in the gaps between multiple reimbursement systems. Third, regardless of these developments, prior forms of fraud are likely to continue. Thus, the Biden administration will have no choice but to devote significant resources to fraud enforcement
Reliance on a Judicial Lifeline: \u3ci\u3eState v. Robinson\u3c/i\u3e and North Carolina\u27s Partisan Battle for the Racial Justice Act
Get PDFSimplicity Lost
Get PDFPolicymakers, government officials, and scholars have long described tax complexity as one of the most serious problems affecting tax administration and tax compliance in the United States. Some of the costs of tax complexity include billions of hours of “paperwork and other headaches” that taxpayers face each year as they attempt to comply with complex tax law, monetary costs that taxpayers bear when they hire advisors and purchase software to report their tax liability and file their tax returns, difficulties that taxpayers encounter when attempting to claim tax credits and other tax benefits, and challenges the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) confronts when attempting to deter tax avoidance and evasion opportunities that tax complexity often creates. Further, the burden of tax complexity, especially related to tax compliance, often falls disproportionately on taxpayers who lack access to sophisticated tax accountants or legal counsel.
In this Article, written for a symposium on the twenty-fifth anniversary of RRA 98, we review the fate of the tax complexity provisions of the legislation. Our analysis shows that the IRS and JCT initially complied with the mandate to provide Congress with general reports on the sources of complexity in the federal tax system. Indeed, they even exerted significant and meaningful effort in doing so. However, we find that, since the early 2000s, the IRS, JCT, and Congress have not fulfilled their statutory obligations regarding the tax complexity provisions of RRA 98. We show that, in contrast to RRA 98’s expressed “sense” of how tax legislation should be produced, representatives of the IRS have not participated meaningfully in the drafting and evaluation of proposed tax legislation. We further demonstrate that the IRS has failed to deliver annual tax complexity reports to Congress, as required by RRA 98. Last, we show that, although the JCT has delivered tax complexity analyses regarding proposed legislation to Congress, these reports have often contained vague and misleading statements regarding the effect of proposed tax law and have appeared too late in the legislative process to have a significant impact on the legislation
