Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This research-in-progress is an ongoing empirical study that incorporates my two main research interests: (1) intellectual property law and (2) the legal profession. I am especially interested in understanding how, why, and to what effect lawyers’ roles in the enforcement of asserted intellectual property rights affects the scope of rights owners’ ability to successfully claim intellectual property protection, primarily in the areas of trademark, copyright, and the right of publicity. Although there is some scholarship that has begun to explore how targets of IP enforcement resist assertions of IP claims, this work is one of the only empirical studies of what lawyers—and their IP-owner clients—actually do in the everyday enforcement of IP rights "under the radar" and in the "shadow of the law". This study is based on both case studies as well as in-depth, semi-structured interviews with IP lawyers who regularly assert IP rights on behalf of largely “repeat player” IP owner clients. One theme explored in this research is whether the intellectual property “Haves” come out ahead in IP enforcement and, if so, what difference it makes. This research also explores, among other issues, whether over-enforcement of intellectual property rights has a deleterious effect on free speech and a vigorous public domain.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper explores the importance of lawyers' arguments to the judicial decision-making process through a study of the strategies employed by environmental and property rights advocates in two important U.S. Supreme Court cases.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper is part of a doctoral dissertation that examines the survival of private property during the communist regime in Romania at the intersection of state policies, ideologies and legal practices. It investigates the extent to which the communist state influenced ideas, practices and processes of using the law, and how past property regimes continue to affect beliefs and everyday consciousness about law. The paper argues that law is at the core of reshaping ideas and practices of property in the communist transition, as a site for continuities and changes that resulted in a hybrid conception of private property, with labor and equality as its two main pillars. As a case study, this paper focuses on houses nationalized and expropriated in Timiş county, Romania, from 1945 to 1960.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Since the 1980s, developing countries have come under intense and unprecedented pressures to revise national frameworks for establishing and protecting intellectual property (IP). When we examine not just what countries are expected to do, however, but how countries have actually gone about implementing their new international obligations, we discover significant cross-national variation in countries strategies for IP management. In this paper I provide a framework to explain such variation, which I then apply to the analysis of IP reform in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. Despite the trend toward regulatory harmonization, these countries – the three largest and most industrialized in Latin America – continue to display significant differences in how they manage IP, and these differences have crucial implications for industrialization, public health and social welfare. To explain the variation I situate the politics of IP in the context of more general analyses of the politics of property. I point to the basic conflicts that always exist around the establishment and management of property rights, and I show how the fundamental politics of property take on specific form in the particular case of intellectual property. Having underscored the distinct fundamentals of IP politics, I then explain what is new about the politics in this issue area, illustrating how the essential political features of the issue-area are transformed by the new global regime for IP management that has emerged since the 1980s. I pay particular attention to how external pressures interact with pre-existing domestic interests to create new constituencies, constellations of political actors, and patterns of political mobilization around IP. systems. Thus, I explain why, in the context of a global sea-change in governance in IP and strong pressures for harmonization, we continue to witness divergent national policies and practices.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper examines the origin, process, and controversy of the 2007 property law in China.