Georgetown University Law Center

About: Georgetown University Law Center is a based out in . It is known for research contribution in the topics: Supreme court & Public health. The organization has 585 authors who have published 2488 publications receiving 36650 citations. The organization is also known as: Georgetown Law & GULC.

Property as Institutions for Resources: Lessons from and for IP

Abstract: The idea of property in land as the paradigm case of property exercises despotic dominion over property thinking. From the perspective of evolving political economy, however, a land-centric model of property makes very little sense. Property institutions coordinate access to resources, and so it is reasonable to expect them to differ in ways that respond to the characteristics of those resources. The debate about whether intellectual property (IP) is property is instructive. IP scholars have pursued the property debate using a conceptual framework derived from common law real property doctrines and organized around the practical and theoretical problems associated with property rights in land, but the resources at the center of debates about the appropriate extent of IP-rightholder control could not be more different from land. Intellectual resources are routinely sliced and diced, aggregated and fractionated, used and reused, in ways that land is not and could not be. This might mean that IP is not property, as some have argued, or it might mean that we have outgrown the monolithic, land-centric model — that in the postindustrial era of wealth production, the cosmology of property can no longer place terra firma at the center.This Article develops an account of property as a set of resource-dependent legal institutions characterized by overlapping sets of family resemblances and then reconsiders the IP question. Property in intellectual goods resembles property in land in some respects, property in natural resources in other respects, property in corporations in others, and property in intangible financial instruments in still others, but also systematically diverges from each of those other forms of property. Legal institutions for IP must accommodate four important points of divergence: the different incentives of creators and intermediaries; the variety of ways in which intellectual goods are produced; the central importance of intermediation within IP ecologies; and the widespread use of licensing to delineate rights and obligations.

Financial Assistance for Health Security: Effects of International Financial Assistance on Capacities for Preventing, Detecting, and Responding to Public Health Emergencies

Abstract: Background: Health security funding is intended to improve the ability to prevent, detect, and respond to public health emergencies. Recent years have witnessed substantial increases in the amounts of donor financial assistance to health security from countries, philanthropies, and other development partners. To date, no work has examined the effects of assistance on health security capacity development over time. This paper presents an analysis of the time-lagged effects of assistance for health security on levels of capacity. Methods: We collected publicly available health security assessment scores published between 2010 and 2019 and data relating to financial assistance for health security. Using validated methods, we rescaled assessment scores on analogous scales to enable comparison and binned them in quartiles. We then used a distributed lag model in a Bayesian ordinal regression framework to assess the effects of assistance for health security on capacity development over time. Findings: Strong evidence exists for associations between financial assistance and select capacities on a variety of lagged time intervals. Financial assistance had positive effects on zoonotic disease capacities in the year it was disbursed, and positive effects on legislation, laboratory, workforce, and risk communication capacities one year after disbursal. Financial assistance had negative effects on laboratory and emergency response capacities two years after it was disbursed. Financial assistance did not have measurable effects on coordination, antimicrobial resistance, food safety, biosafety, surveillance, preparedness, or risk communication capacities over the timeframe considered. Interpretation: Financial assistance for health security is associated with positive effects for several core health security capacities. However, for the majority of capacities, levels of funding were not significantly associated with capacity level, though we cannot fully exclude endogeneity. Future work should continue to investigate these relationships in different contexts and examine other factors that may contribute to capacity development. Funding Statement: The Open Philanthropy Project provided financial support to the Georgetown University Center for Global Health Science & Security that supported this work. Declaration of Interests: The authors declare no competing interests.

Performance Anxiety: Copyright Embodied and Disembodied

Abstract: The primary economic and cultural significance of copyright today comes from works and rights that weren’t contemplated by the Framers of the Constitution’s Copyright Clause. Performance — both as protected work and as right — is where much of copyright’s expansion has had its greatest impact, as new technologies have made it possible to fix performances in records and films and as cultural change has propelled recorded music and audiovisual works to the forefront of the copyright industries. Yet copyright has never fully conceptualized performance, and this has led to persistent confusion about what copyright protects.One key problem of performance from copyright’s perspective is how to identify the creative elements that make a work of performance original and protectable, as distinguished from elements that make it a work (a fixed artifact). A major variant of this question involves authorship: who is sufficiently responsible for a work of performance to be deemed its author, and thus its default owner? In a world where works require dozens and even hundreds of people to complete them, this question will often be difficult to answer while both respecting creativity and recognizing economic imperatives. Another set of questions involves whether there are ways to recognize performers’ creative contributions without contributing to copyright’s bloat, and how to assess claims of infringement in a performance context when the alleged copying isn’t exact. This article addresses these puzzles of performance, arguing that manageability rather than creativity is generally the basis for the rights allocations and distinctions copyright law makes. The recent controversy over the film Innocence of Muslims, along with other instances in which subjects of audiovisual works claimed copyright in those works, demonstrate the limited role played by creativity in copyright law.

What is Eleventh Amendment Immunity

Abstract: The Supreme Court's Eleventh Amendment decisions give conflicting signals about what the Amendment does. On one view, the Amendment functions as a forum-allocation principle--immunizing states from liability in suits filed in federal court, but leaving open the possibility that states may be compelled to entertain suits against themselves in their own courts. A separate line of cases, however, implies that state courts enjoy an immunity from suit in their own courts and that nothing in the Constitution withdraws such immunity; on this view, the Eleventh Amendment, by protecting the states from suit in the federal courts, effectively immunizes the states from any damage liability to individuals under federal law. This latter view finds strong support in last term's decision in Seminole Tribe of Florida v. Florida. This article examines the doctrinal support for these competing lines of cases, and looks for ways to reconcile them. The article also considers the rule-of-law ramifications of adopting the latter interpretation of the Amendment. It concludes that so long as officials remain personally liable in damages for their willful violations of federal law, the latter interpretation comports tolerably well with the rule-of-law ideal that for violations of federal rights there be a federally enforceable remedy. If so, then what matters most from a rule-of-law perspective is not so much which of the two interpretations of the Eleventh Amendment the Court adopts, but that it clearly and definitively adopt one or the other.

Uncovering the Reformation Roots of American Marriage and Divorce Law

Abstract: The roots of American family law were planted nearly four centuries ago when New England Puritans embraced civil marriage and divorce. In England, by contrast, marriage was overseen by the ecclesiastical courts until the mid-eighteenth century, and courts did not grant divorces until well into the nineteenth century. This article identifies and analyses the non-English sources of American family law. The theological case made by Martin Luther in the early sixteenth century for preferring marriage (and divorce) to celibacy laid the conceptual foundation for both civil marriage and fault-based divorce. The Zurich Ordinance of 1525 was not only the first modern marriage and divorce law, it contained no-fault as well as fault grounds for divorce. The reform marriage and divorce practices the Puritans brought with them to New England not only were not English, they were strikingly similar to those of Reformation Europe. Secular control of marriage was adopted by the colonies outside of New England as well, not because of sectarian disputes, but because the Church of England was not able to establish ecclesiastical courts that could oversee marriage as they did in England. Thus a complex mix of sectarian differences and the absence of ecclesiastical courts explains the paradox of why the United States, despite the religious fervor of many of its original colonists, nonetheless was a pioneer in adopting secular marriage and divorce law.