human rights – Page 2

Graham and McJohn: “Thirty Two Short Stories about Intellectual Property”

June 24, 2010Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Lorie Graham and Stephen M. McJohn have posted their paper, “Thirty Two Short Stories about Intellectual Property,” on SSRN.

Here is the abstract:

In the United States, intellectual property law is usually viewed as serving economics, by providing an incentive for authors and inventors to create works. The incentive policy, however, ill fits the actual contours of intellectual property law and how artists and inventors use it. Adding other approaches offers a fuller explanation. Intellectual property plays a greater role than economic theory suggests in disclosing technology, and in serving to coordinate cultural values in technology. Intellectual property can serve human rights (similar to the moral rights approach in some jurisdictions), by allowing people to control the way that their works are publicly exploited, and by allowing groups (such as indigenous peoples) to implement rights of self-determination, education, and media.

This piece also departs from the typical law review format. In assessing doctrine and theory, deductive reasoning from economic or legal principles is no more important than literary tools, like interpretation and narrative. These points can be illustrated by some stories.

Patrick Macklem on Minority Rights in International Law

September 8, 2008Matthew L.M. Fletcher1 Comment

Patrick Macklem has posted “Minority Rights in International Law” on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

Why should international human rights law vest members of a minority community – either individually or collectively – with rights that secure a measure of autonomy from the state in which they are located? To the extent that the field offers answers to this question, it does so from its deep commitment to the protection of certain universal attributes of human identity from the exercise of sovereign power. It protects minority rights on the assumption that religious, cultural and linguistic affiliations are essential features of what it means to be human. There exists an alternative account of why minority rights possess international significance, one that trades less on the currency of religion, culture and language and more on the value of international distributive justice. On this account, international minority rights speak to wrongs that that international law itself produces by organizing international political reality into a legal order. This account avoids the normative instabilities of attaching universal value to religious, cultural and linguistic affiliation and instead challenges the international legal order to remedy pathologies of its own making.