IP: It's also about trust and French chefs

There is a principle in the law known as ‘admission againstinterest’. Here is my own admission. While we are delightedto bring together this collection of quality articles aboutthe multifaceted world of IP licensing and technology transfer,something is missing: we need to broaden our coverage aboutthe diverse ways that IP rights are licensed and transferred. To judge from the professional literature, licensing and technologytransfer primarily address the exploitation of patents, copyright,and trade marks. Each of these rights is based upon disclosureand     

The Parliamentary Standards Act 2009: A Constitutional Dangerous Dogs Measure?

The scandal which broke over MPs' abuses of the allowances system during the course of the last parliamentary session shows little sign of abating. As a result of an audit undertaken by Sir Thomas Legg, some MPs have been required to repay sums which were successfully claimed up to five years ago. Although this development has been welcomed by the public, it has been condemned by some in Parliament as being retrospective and unfair. In this article, the discussion focuses on the key provisions of the Parliamentary Standards Act 2009 which was enacted in order to tackle the issues raised by the expenses scandal. It considers their import and how they are likely to apply in practice. Since the Act is a further example of ‘fast‐track’ legislation, there was no opportunity for pre‐legislative scrutiny. This may help to explain why the Act differs in several important respects from the Bill which was originally introduced. It is highly likely that the 2009 Act will be the subject of post‐legislative scrutiny, especially since it contains a renewal provision.     

Organizational Trust and the Limits of Management‐Based Regulation

This article examines the relationship between management‐based regulation and occupational health and safety through two case studies. The first describes how corporate occupational health and safety systems and standards were interpreted and implemented differently at different mine sites within the same company and examines the particular role of trust between workers and management in explaining variations in occupational health and safety performance. The second explores the difficulties of moving from a highly devolved system of responsibility to a more centralized approach, and the incapacity of externally mandated management‐based regulation to change behavior at site level in the absence of a supportive workplace culture. The article argues that notwithstanding the heavy emphasis currently being placed on both internal (company‐driven) and external (government‐driven) management‐based regulation, a commitment at corporate level does not necessarily percolate down to individual facilities where ritualistic responses or resistant subcultures may thwart effective change. The findings have important implications for the effectiveness of management‐based regulation and meta‐regulation more broadly.     

The New Collaborative Environmental Governance: The Localization of Regulation

This article examines the new collaborative environmental governance, an enterprise that involves collaboration between a diversity of private, public, and non-government stakeholders who, acting together towards commonly agreed goals, hope to achieve far more collectively, than individually. Such an approach appears to blur the familiar sharp boundaries that separate 'the state' from civil society, yet we still know very little about exactly what this blurring of public and private adds up to, and what its implications are. This new form of governance is examined through the lens of three Australian case studies. Each of these studies involves participatory dialogue, flexibility, inclusiveness, transparency, institutionalized consensus-building practices, and, at least to some extent, a shift from hierarchy to heterarchy. The paper examines the relationships between new and old governance, the architecture of these new initiatives, the role of the state, and the importance of negotiating in 'the shadow of hierarchy'.     

RELIGIOUS INTOLERANCE IN POST-CIVIL WAR SRI LANKA

Post-civil war, Buddhism has gone from being a privileged religion in Sri Lanka to a hegemonic religion. If the ethnic conflict with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam calcified Sinhalese Buddhist sensibilities, the comprehensive victory over the group has emboldened Sinhalese Buddhist nationalists who insist on majority superordination and minority subordination. This essay discusses how the nationalist ideology undergirding Sinhalese Buddhist majoritarianism has exacerbated religious intolerance especially towards the island's Muslims and Christian Evangelicals.     

Constraining a Principal's Choice: Outcome versus Behavior Contingent Agency Contracts in Representative Negotiations

Agency theory describes the viability of outcome and behavior contingent contracts in principal–agent transactions. This article proposes that a principal's choice between the two contract forms in a representative negotiation is constrained by the conditions that led a principal to employ an agent. Six of these conditions — expertise, emotional strain, the principal's preferred engagement strategy, zone of possible agreement, communal relationship norms, and repeated interactions between principals — are reviewed and summarized in testable propositions. Specifically, the six conditions are proposed to underscore the viability of behavior versus outcome contingent contracts in serving the principal's substantive and relationship-based interests.     

Making inferences about jury behavior from jury verdict statistics

The jury research that appears to have had the most impact on judges, policymakers, and legal academics concerned with the civil justice system involves studies using data on jury verdict statistics. This article sets forth the serious methodological problems with such studies and documents the fact that, for many purposes, the conclusions that authors have drawn from them are scientifically invalid because plausible rival alternative hypptheses cannot be eliminated. The article concludes with cautions about the seductive appeal of jury verdict data and the need to clearly recognize and state their limitations.Professors George Christie, Samuel Gross, Valerie Hans, Richard Lempert, James Levine, Michael Saks, Joseph Sanders, and Clive Seligman made many helpful comments on this article, and so did my research assistants: Jessica Buranosky Lee, Elaina Cohen, and David Landau. I also want to gratefully acknowledge an intellectual debt of over three decades to Professor Joseph E. McGrath, who scribbled about research designs and the meaning of data, and to Professor Lloyd G. Humphreys, who first introduced me to problems of measurement.