A super list of canonical scholarship in patent law has been assembled and posted by Lisa Larrimore Oullette at the Written Description blog. Read the whole thing here.
Lisa’s post picks up a theme that I mused about a few years ago in posts titled “Lost Classics of Intellectual Property Law” (in four parts, “Background,” “Copyright,” “Patent,” and “Trademark“). Â IP scholars, and junior IP scholars in particular, made me grumpy when they presented work that appeared to ignore prior scholarship — and not any old prior scholarship, but old prior scholarship that was important and relevant. They still do. Most of the “not ready for prime time” work to which I alluded in my recent post about IPSC is not ready because it betrays an ignorance of scholarly history. It turns out that I am not alone in publicly complaining about this. See this recent Prawfs post by Paul Horwitz. I, and now Lisa, are trying to do something to fix it. Please – if you’re a patent scholar, share her list, and if you’re a scholar in some other field, consider borrowing her method and compiling an equivalent public resource.