Amy Kapczynski
Feature
Building a Law-and-Political-Economy Framework: Beyond the Twentieth-Century Synthesis
Current crises of economic inequality and eroding democracy require us to move beyond legal orientations that prioritize efficiency, neutrality, and apolitical governance. This Feature suggests new orientations and questions for scholarship on “law and political economy” that instead foreground real…
Review
The Law of Informational Capitalism
Informational capitalism brings new dangers of surveillance and manipulation—but also of accelerating monopoly, inequality, and democratic disempowerment. Examining two important new books on the topic, this Review maps the law and political economy of informational capitalism, a domain of rising pr…
Essay
The Continuum of Excludability and the Limits of Patents
122 Yale L.J. 1900 (2013).
In IP scholarship, patents are commonly understood as more efficient than other approaches to innovation policy. Their primary ostensible advantage is allocative: as a form of property rights, patents act as a conduit between market signals and potential innovators, ostensi…
Forum
Linking Ideas to Outcomes: A Response
It is a distinct pleasure to have the chance to respond to the insightful commentaries of Peter Drahos, Ruth Okediji, and Tomiko Brown-Nagin. I find much to agree with in each, but I will focus on a few areas of divergence in the hope of clarifying our differences. Drahos’s work on the role of id…
Article
The Access to Knowledge Mobilization and the New Politics of Intellectual Property
117 Yale L.J. 804 (2008).
Intellectual property law was once an arcane subject. Today it is at the center of some of the most highly charged political contests of our time. In recent years, college students, subsistence farmers, AIDS activists, genomic scientists, and free-software programmers have…
Note
Same-Sex Privacy and the Limits of Antidiscrimination Law
112 Yale L.J. 1257 (2003)
Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, as it has been interpreted by the courts, is an uncompromising statute. It bars adverse employment actions taken on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, and national origin, with only one exception: in cases where an employer can …
Comment
Queer Brinksmanship: Citizenship and the Solomon Wars
112 Yale L.J. 673 (2002)
In 1994, Congress passed a law commonly known as the Solomon Amendment, threatening universities and law schools with loss of federal funding if they deny or effectively prevent military recruiters from accessing campuses and directory information about students. It was the …