Article by barton beebe :: This Article assesses intellectual property law’s emerging role as a modern form of sumptuary law. The Article observes that we have begun to rely on certain areas of intellectual property law to provide us with the means to preserve our conventional system of consumption-based social distinction, our sumptuary code, in the face of incipient social and technological conditions that threaten the viability of this code. Through sumptuary intellectual property law, we seek in particular to suppress the revolutionary social and cultural implications of our increasingly powerful copying technology. Sumptuary intellectual property law is thus taking shape as the socially and culturally reactionary antithesis of the more familiar technologically progressive side of intellectual property law. The Article identifies the conditions that are bringing about this peculiar juncture of intellectual property law and sumptuary law and evidences this juncture in various evolving intellectual property law doctrines.
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Book Review by edward rubin ::

GOVERNMENT BY CONTRACT: OUTSOURCING AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY. Edited by Jody Freeman and Martha Minow. Cam-bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 2009. Pp. viii, 528. $49.95.

This excellent collection of essays arrives when the debate about privatization is already well advanced. Beginning largely during the 1970s, but accelerating in response to the second Bush Administration’s unalloyed enthusiasm for privatization, the scholarly literature on privatization is now voluminous. In fact, a number of the contributors to this volume have already written books or extensive articles about the topic. This is an advantage. It means not only that the contributors are extremely knowledgeable, but also that they have moved past the overheated enthusiasm or instinctive horror with which the debate began to more modulated and informed positions. They can therefore enter into a sustained, constructive dialogue with each other that constitutes a further virtue of Government by Contract. In all too many edited volumes, the contributors talk past each other; these contributors have read one another’s work, taken it seriously, and responded in ways that deepen the debate.
READ MORE | DOWNLOAD PDF | February 2010