The 2015 Nies Lecture: What Is “Intellectual Property,” Exactly, and How Does It Relate to Water Law?

Fall StreamI’m very excited about this year’s Nies Lecture, which will be delivered by Prof. Henry Smith of Harvard Law School in just a little more than a week — Thursday, April 16th, at 4:30pm. (Register now to attend!) The title is “Semicommons in Fluid Resources,” but that only hints at the depth of the waters, so to speak, that Prof. Smith is likely to explore. As I understand it, the topic is nothing less than the nature of property itself, and how some forms of it — rights to water, and intellectual property — occupy a “middle ground” between communal governance and individual ownership. That has important ramifications for copyright law in particular, in which the dividing line between common goals and individual incentives lies at the heart of numerous doctrines.

The issue is this: suppose you have some sort of resource that multiple people want to use. Say it’s a particular piece of land. As Smith has written previously, there are two basic ways of specifying rules for what people can do with that resource: you could draw lines around objects, or you could draw lines around uses. That is, you could identify a particular object, such as a plot of land, and say that one person has the right to decide all permitted uses of it. (Or that everyone has the right to decide what they will do with it, turning it into a commons, or no one does, turning it into a forbidden zone.) Alternatively, you could draw lines around uses, not objects, and say that person X has the right to engage in activity A using the piece of land in question, and spell out rules governing each person or set of persons and telling them what uses they can make of the land and which they can’t, and under what conditions.

As Smith has argued, these different methods are best viewed as lying on a spectrum.

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Exploitative Businesses and the Perpetuation of Poverty

walker-thomas_furniture_signProf. David Papke has a new article in print, entitled “Perpetuating Poverty: Exploitative Businesses, the Urban Poor, and the Failure of Reform,” appearing in 16 St. Mary’s Law Review on Race & Social Justice 223 (2014). Here is the abstract:

While rent-to-own outlets, payday lenders, and title pawns operate in suburban and rural areas, these exploitative businesses are most concentrated in America’s inner cities. The businesses’ highly crafted, standardized contractual agreements are central in their business models and for the most part enforceable in the courts. What’s more, the contractual agreements and business models are so sophisticated and adjustable as to make them virtually impervious to regulation or legislative reform. The businesses as a result continue not only to exploit the urban poor but also to socioeconomically subjugate them by trapping them into a ceaseless debt cycle. Profits go up when the urban poor cannot pay up, and rent-to-own outlets, payday lenders, and title pawns take advantage of urban poverty while simultaneously increasing and perpetuating it.

An earlier draft of the paper appeared on SSRN.

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Welcome to Our April Blogger

flowersOur April guest blogger with be 3L Elizabeth Oestreich.  Elizabeth is from Fond du Lac and is interested in labor and employment law, family law, and general civil litigation, although she has heard that law school interests do not necessarily determine career paths. Many thanks to our previous guest, 1L Jessica Lothman.

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