Via Tim Armstrong at Info/Law, I learned today that the Harvard Law School faculty voted to create an online open access repository of their scholarship.
To me, the vastly more interesting and provocative part of Tim’s post is a news item that I missed 10 days ago:  Berkman Center Executive Director John Palfrey will become the new […]

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Posts by others that caught my eye recently:
Rebecca Tushnet summarizes a very interesting public discussion on Bridgeman v. Corel, the district court opinion by Judge Kaplan, now nine years old, that holds that copyright does not attach to especially good photographic reproductions of public domain works of fine art.
Siva Vaidhyanathan tackles the rhetorics of “open” […]

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With so many interesting information law and policy topics floating around the blogosphere, you would think that something more, well, substantial, would catch my eye.  But instead I’ve been hooked by cardboard boxes.
Out of Denver yesterday came the news that a man was threatened with a violation of federal law for recycling U.S. Postal Service […]

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Shameless self-promotion alert:  I’ve just posted a short paper on SSRN, titled “Intellectual Property and Americana, or Why IP Gets the Blues.” (Download it here.) It’s just been published in a symposium issue of the Fordham Intellectual Property Media & Entertainment Law Journal, along with pieces by Mark Lemley, Dan Burk, Rob Frieden, and Tal […]

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Perhaps appropriately on the last day of this fascinating stream of mobbloging, I thought I would try and offer a partial defense of the-way-things-are-right now on the law review front:

Don’t romanticize the alternative: When one begins to publish in the peer-reviewed world, the whole romantic notion of blind review becomes somewhat tainted — in all […]

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Now that both Mike and I have broached the possibility that economic change could radically affect the demand for attorneys in the future, let me say a little about the relationship between the law school and the market.
Optimistically, we might praise “market discipline” for law schools. Law firms want to reduce clients’ expenses; governments […]

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Just over a year ago I pointed to a lawsuit brought by Bob Yari, producer of the 2006 Best Picture Oscar winner Crash, against the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) and the Producers Guild of America.  AMPAS writes the rules for the Academy Awards, and in 2005, before the competition that resulted […]

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Jessica Litman came to Pitt last week to deliver our annual “Distinguished Intellectual Property Lecture,” and she argued from the following premise:  Not only are the stars are aligned such that comprehensive copyright reform may be possible — roughly equivalent to what we experienced during the 1960s and early 1970s — but that it is […]

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Jill Lepore has a very interesting and provocative essay in a recent New Yorker, teasing apart distinctions between fact and fantasy, between works of popular history and works of popular fiction.  Her thesis?  That the distinction may be gendered:
By the end of the eighteenth century, not just novel readers but most novel writers were women, […]

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Law professors who teach intellectual property and information law subjects are, on the whole, a pretty lively, friendly, and social bunch, and our numbers are growing.  The market has a seemingly endless capacity to absorb new faculty, as law schools across the rankings spectrum hire first one, then a second, and increasingly a third IP specialist.
If my […]

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In the most recent issue of The Economist, I found an ad for the upcoming “General Counsel West Coast Roundtable.”  Kent Walker, Google’s GC, will give the keynote presentation.  According to the ad copy, he “argues that lawyers play a critical role in promoting innovation.  In the face of change, the lawyer’s role is not […]

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Three things seem related today:
First:  I saw Be Kind, Rewind this weekend.  The movie has an amiable charm.  It’s a goofball of a film, wildly implausible at every level and built out of devices that scrape the pavement of the plot like broken mufflers.  But there’s a winning performance from Jack Black (is there any other […]

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It’s a good thing that I have a couple of trips to New York City planned for later this Spring, because what looks like a can’t-miss exhibition has just opened at the Museum of Modern Art:  Design and the Elastic Mind.
Over the past twenty-five years, people have weathered dramatic changes in their experience of time, […]

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For better or for worse, ratings and rankings of U.S. law schools are here to stay.  Citation count studies of law professors are often held up as the best alternative to U.S. News rankings of law schools, but other “non-flaky” systems are out there.  Here are two. 
Inside Higher Ed today reports on plans at the Green […]

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Passionate followers of professional football know that the National Football League is just now concluding its annual “combine,” the camp where would-be draftees get timed, tested, and measured by pro scouts in anticipation of draft day.  There are speed tests, jumping tests, “position specific events,” measurements, and the famous or infamous Wonderlic intelligence test.  The […]

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Lest I get too carried away by the prospect of “Rep. Lessig,” I want to add my voice to the chorus of praise for an upcoming copyright conference that I have nothing to do with and cannot attend:
AHRC Primary Sources on Copyright History Project:
Conference – Wednesday 19th and Thursday 20th March 2008 – Stationers’ Hall, […]

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Stanford lawprof Larry Lessig is thinking of running for Congress.  Should he do it?  Is this the most effective way to leverage his anti-corruption message?
I believe that the last time a brilliant young Stanford law faculty member ran for Congress, he ended up serving several (non-sequential) terms.  Professor Tom Campbell eventually ran for the U.S. […]

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For the second time in three months, Harvard has moved aggressively to stake out a leadership position at the intersection of higher education, public policy, and distributive justice.  Whether or not you agree with the merits of Harvard’s positions, in some very specific ways it is interesting to watch Mother Harvard assert itself, both on […]

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This week at the Chicago Faculty Blog, a mobblog of distinguished commentators has been kicking around Molly Van Houweling’s interesting recent article, The New Servitudes (Georgetown Law Journal, forthcoming, I believe).  (Here’s a link to the list of posts.)  The paper attempts to situate “new” servitudes — prospective rules that enable and disable uses of intangible things, […]

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I saw a great concert by Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock, and Jack DeJohnette at Newark’s NJPAC last night (which Jarrett called “one of the best halls–if not the best–in the US”). It was a really extraordinary performance, especially during one transcendent passage near the end where he was seamlessly interweaving some classical themes with […]

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