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Background

It is my great privilege to work as a legal scholar. As of July 2007, I will be an Associate Professor of Law at Seton Hall University Law School, where I am part of the school’s Institute for Law, Science and Technology.

My scholarship focuses on the law, norms and economics of intellectual property and information. In many ways, I consider myself a “Critical Information Studies” scholar. Much of my work concerns biologically encoded information and the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries.

I studied law and economics and regulatory theory at New York University Law School, where I earned an LL.M. in Trade Regulation in 1998. I earned my J.D. in 1991 from Seton Hall University Law School. Before entering academe full-time, I was a Partner in the Information Technology / Intellectual Property practice group of McCarter & English, LLP.

Publications
Here is a list of my recent publications:

Patents, Essential Medicines, and the Innovation Game, 58 Vanderbilt Law Review 501 (2005). This article is a game theory analysis of the effects of differing levels of patent protection on access to essential medicines in developing countries.

The Penguin’s Genome, or Coase and Open Source Biotechnology, 18 Harvard J. Law & Tech. 167 (2004). This article is an analysis of whether open source development principles can apply to biotechnology.

Peer-to-Peer Networks, Technological Evolution, and Intellectual Property Reverse Private Attorney General Litigation, 20 Berkeley Tech. L.J. 1685 (2005). This paper analyzes “reverse private attorney general” litigation by intellectual property owners against individuals, using the RIAA file sharing litigation as a model.

The Penguin’s Paradox: The Political Economy of International Intellectual Property and the Paradox of Open Intellectual Property Models, 18 Stanford Law & Policy Rev. ___ (2007) (symposium) (forthcoming). The article provides a game theoretic political economy analysis of efforts to encode “open source” and “open access” intellectual property norms into public policy via the international intellectual property system.

A Virtue-Centered Approach to the Biotechnology Commons (or, The Virtuous Penguin), 59 Maine Law Review ___ (2007) (symposium) (forthcoming). This essay sketches out a virtue ethics/virtue jurisprudence approach to biotechnology intellectual property policy.

Work in Progress

Currently, I’m working on the following projects:

The Information Commons and the Ontology of Information. This paper will explore the metaphor of the “commons” as applied to information. Is information really non-rival and non-excludable? What do we mean when we use the term “information?”

Biotechnology and the Anti-Commons . This project involves an empirical study of the innovation inputs into an important biotechnology product. The goal is to assess the extent to which proprietary rights increased transaction costs during the course of the innovation that led to the production of this product.

A Virtue Jurisprudence of Information. This project will extend the discussion of virtue ethics in my “Virtuous Penguin” article, in an effort to develop a richer virtue ethics approach to information policy.

This afternoon was one of those “rubber meeting the road” times. My 11-year-old daughter, who goes to public school, adores her science teacher. Today, however, she came home very upset. It seems they’ve begun to study evolution, and my daughter is feeling an enormous conflict with what she’s been taught in Sunday School.

This is so difficult and delicate a thing to have to start navigating. Intending no disrespect to anyone who might thing otherwise, I don’t think young earth creationism is a good way to approach this sort of thing. Yet, on the one hand I don’t want to nip her respect for the church and her Sunday School teachers or to bring her into conflict with any of her Christian friends; on the other, I don’t want her to be afraid of science; and on yet another, I don’t want her to think scientists necessarily have the last word. I did my best to start explaining how there are different ways of looking at how God created the heavens and the earth, and that some things — like that there is a God and that God is the creator — are primary while others — like how old the earth is or what natural processes God used to create — can be discussed.

Anyone have any tips, resources, etc. for helping a kid this age start to navigate this minefield?

Today I participated in a blogger’s conference call graciously hosted by Joe Carter of the Family Research Council. The guests were Prison Fellowship President Mark Earley and Anthony Picarello of the Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty. The discussion centered on an Iowa District Court’s decision finding Prison Fellowship’s Innerchange Initiative, an anti-recidivism program, unconstitutional.

I should note that I greatly admire Prison Fellowship and its Innerchange program. This is exactly the sort of thing the Chuch is supposed to do in the world. From what I know of the Beckett Fund, I admire their religious liberty work as well. I’m an ardent advocate of religious liberty. In this particular instance, however, it seems to me that Prison Fellowship’s strategy was misguided and that the arguments the Beckett Fund is making slice the salami pretty thin.

Early and Picarello highlighted the troublesome aspects of the Iowa court’s ruling: the court unnecessarily traipsed into a definition of “evangelical” Christianity based on the testimony of one expert witness (who isn’t an evangelical), and levied an absurdly large restitution award against IFI. I think they are correct about these aspects of the opinion.

Early and Picarello also argued that the court’s opinion could be read to eliminate any federal funding for the activities of any person whose personal convictions are fundamentally religious. I think this is a major stretch. I discussed the case at some length when it was first decided. In my view, Prison Fellowship was trying to have it both ways in this instance. On the one hand, they base their program on the belief that true and deep change only happens through acceptance of Christ; on the other, they argued in court that there are “secular” aspects of the program that are separable from these particularly religious and evangelical ones and therefore appropriately subject to federal funding.

It was nice to be able to have a lively exchange with Early and Picarello on the conference call (I hope I didn’t butt in too much). They are clearly both capable people. However, I don’t feel that they were able to answer my concerns in a satisfactory way. Picarello argued that the Iowa ruling could concievably extend to say, a schoolteacher who in a general way feels that teaching kids is a form of witness and ministry. Anything is possible, I suppose, but this seems highly unlikely, to say the least. The Iowa ruling deals with a specific program / ministry, the fundamental goal of which is to convert inmates to Christianity and encourage them in their Christian faith. That goal is implemented through explicity Christian evangelistic meetings and extensive Christian teaching. It isn’t just offering a “cup of cold water” or having a generally religious personal motivation for an otherwise routine activity like teaching high school English.

Early and Picarello also suggested that the Iowa ruling could apply not only to federally funded recidivism programs, but also to privately funded ones. This would indeed be a problem. I’m not sure I see how this is so, however. The court held that IFI was a “public actor,”and that “as providers of a state-funded treatment program, they are burdened with the same responsibilities of any state employee: to respect the civil rights of all persons, including the First Amendment’s prohibition on indoctrinating others in their form of religion.” (Opinion at 100, emphasis added).

I think the question here arises from the ancillary benefits provided to inmates who attend the program, and the court’s factual conclusion that there are no meaningful alternatives to IFI in that particular prison system. If prisoners get benefits such as early release, and there is no other non-religious alternative, a court might find an establishment clause problem. During the call, Picarello noted that the court simply got the facts wrong here; there were other meaningful alternatives. In any event, I’m having trouble seeing the more sweeping constitutional implications Picarello alludes to. This seems to me more like a factual question about this particular prison system, which the court may or may not have gotten right.

Thanks again to Joe Carter for setting up the call and to Mark Earley and Anthony Picarello for participating. As always, I welcome comments from folks with different perspectives. Am I getting this one wrong and overreacting to the “religious right” overtones?

Some golfing buddies and I were trying to decide whether to play a course close to home or a course that is $20 cheaper but an hour away. We were discussing whether the “love bank” credits with our wives for playing closer to home and thus getting home for dinner were worth the additional $20 in green fees. To provide a more empirical basis for this decision, I devised the following (admittedly sexist) formula for determining the monetary value of “love bank” credits. (Actually the formula determines the marginal value of adding additional love bank credits to an existing love bank.)

“I’m a babe magnet … but there aren’t any babes to attract.”

— My eight-year-old son.

Jeff recently wrote on the state of his blog, the Dawn Treader, and it inspired me to think about the state of this site. Jeff noted that he writes to gain perspective (via organizing and refining his thoughts, like the discipline of journaling) and to practice his writing. He also writes to persuade, but more as a possible incidental side benefit than a primary purpose.

I keep this site for these same reasons, and for a few others. I have to break the alliteration now, but here are some other reasons I like to blog:

• Learning from others. I’ve learned tons from other bloggers and commenters. Blogging has introduced me to perspectives and resources I wouldn’t have found on my own. Discussing — even arguing — in blogs and other on-line forums also has helped me clarify my thinking on many things.
• Modeling. My aspiration for this site, which I probably don’t ever fully realize, is at least in some small way to model some things to others in the Christian community — in particular, that we can love God “with all our minds,” engage ideas, examine different perspectives, perhaps disagree, or even maybe develop in our own thinking about some things, without being defensive or resorting to angry rhetoric.
• Resourcing. I often come across books, music, and other resources that are helpful to me and that I think might be helpful to others. I want to highlight those things so that others can perhaps benefit from them as well.

This site isn’t yet near where I want it to be on any of these counts. When I changed my banner a while back, I included the subtitles “Theology, Culture, Society, Justice.” My intent was, and still is, to build sections of the site that will focus on these topics, with content from my posts as well as external content. It hasn’t happened, because life is too busy. I’d also like to do some things to build traffic. Like Jeff, I’m happy to be in the “long tail” of the blogsphere, but I’m afraid sometimes that I’m more like some of the dead skin that gets sloughed off the tail when the animal molts. Maybe with the new season I’ll get some of this done!?

Last week was busy in a good way. Over the weekend and through Tuesday, I was at Northern Frontier camp with my older son. We had a blast shooting air rifles, launching model rockets, jumping off the thirteen-foot high dive, singing goofy campfire songs, and reading the Bible together. This is what it’s all about.

On Thursday, I took the GRE, as I’m hoping to apply to some Ph.D. programs this year. As expected, I crushed the verbal section — over 700, probably a 90th percentile score — but my math, shall we say, needs some work. The programs I’m looking at most seriously are the Communication and Culture program at NYU, which has a strong focus on Internet-related legal and regulatory issues, and the political science program at CUNY. Both of those are things I could do while in my current academic post. I was thinking as well of the public policy programs at Princeton, but I don’t think I’ll be able to get the math score where it needs to be for that. I’ll have to talk with some people and see if I need a better math score for the NYU and CUNY programs I’m considering.

I also worked hard late in the week to finalize a draft of my latest paper, “The Penguin’s Paradox: the Political Economy of International Intellectual Property and the Paradox of Open Intellectual Property Models.” It’s now out to the law reviews, so we’ll see if I get any publication nibbles.

I played golf Friday at Wild Turkey and had a pretty good round for me, especially on the front nine — I broke 100, though barely and with a hole or two where I took a mullligan.

Now, we’re at the Jersey shore for a week, reading, swimming with the kids, and relaxing. Thank God for summer!

Here are some shots of me on the links at Connemara:

We played 27 holes. I shot a 50 on the front nine, which isn’t bad on this very tough links course. After that, I got tired and my swing broke down. Tomorrow after I teach I’m playing at Bearna, a nearby parkland course. On Friday, I’m hoping to take a long drive north to play at Carne.

This morning I attended Galway Christian Fellowship, a local evangelical / charismatic church. It was good to worship with other believers, as I’ve missed church the past two Sundays. I found the church because I saw their sign on the road from Galway airport. Galway Christian was a welcoming place, even though, as some of the members explained to me, they are in a difficult time of transition. I hope to play golf with one of the members and his son sometime this week. It’s good to be part of the family of God, with brothers and sisters around the world!

Here is the Chuck Colson essay I referred to in this post. I really wish he’d stop using his bully pulpit to charicature the emerging church, which I think he doesn’t really understand because of a generation gap problem.

I’m truly baffled by the conservative reaction to a version of the Star Spangled Banner in Spanish. We should delight in the fact that people for whom Spanish is a first language, or a cultural language, want to identify their culture with America. Goodness sakes, it’s a hymn, not a magical incantation. Everyone of good will should be welcomed here. That’s what made us great.