Skip to content

Ideas

Common Law and Institutional Design

Beth Noveck posts some interesting reflections on reading Fred Schauer’s recent piece, The Failure of the Common Law (36 Ariz. St. L.J. 765 (2004)). Schauer argues, descriptively, that the common law really isn’t so superior after all, since it relies on faith in a certain set of customary social patterns, and the growing particularization of law shows that the faith is fading. In light of Schauer, she wonders, what forms will legal institutions take? Look not to the common law in particular, or to institutional design in general, but to novel forms of lawmaking: open standards for software and open access principles for content. Debates between open and closed content will pull lawmaking away from older rules/standards dichotomies and into new, blended institutional designs that accommodate new customs, built on open and closed interests.

I wonder whether this line of thinking casts “the law” too narrowly as “the decisionmaker(s).”

Read More »Common Law and Institutional Design

P2P Health Care

Last Friday, I was the designated “legal implications” speaker at a University of Pittsburgh conference on Technology and Aging. The conference kicked off with a keynote by Eric Dishman of Intel, who gave a rousing talk about the coming move from the “mainframe model” of health care delivery (for all your health care needs, go to the huge, expensive medical center) to the “personal computer” model of health care delivery (technology-supported, individually-controlled information monitoring and management). Eric took special care to distinguish technology development in this space from the (obviously less important) problem of the “blinking VCR.” And all of the presentations that followed were excellent demonstrations of the idea that personal empowerment is the endgame for independent living as we age.

I was on the last panel of the day. I began my remarks with the observation that while Eric Dishman was a great researcher, Eric Dishman’s framing was wrong. The rest of my remarks went something like this:

Read More »P2P Health Care

The Meaning of the Adelphi Charter

Under the sponsorship of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, known as RSA, a group of high-profile academicians and activists recently released something called the “Adelphi Charter on creativity, innovation and intellectual property.”

From the Charter’s homepage:

The Charter sets out new principles for copyrights and patents, and calls on governments to apply a new public interest test.

It promotes a new, fair, user-friendly and efficient way of handing out intellectual property rights in the 21st century.

The Charter has been written by an international group of artists, scientists, lawyers, politicians, economists, academics and business experts.

Full text, with comments, below the fold. Also below the fold: What does this mean, and why should anyone pay attention?

Read More »The Meaning of the Adelphi Charter