Steven D. Jamar

Institute for Intellectual Property and Social Justice, United States

Protection for intellectual property has never been absolute; it has always been limited in the public interest. The benefits of intellectual property protection are meant to flow to everyone, not just a limited population of creators and the corporations that represent them. Given this social-utility function, intellectual property regimes must ad...

In this chapter we explore IP protectability of what may be broadly termed "folk music," though that is a term fraught with ambiguity, from an intellectual property social justice (IP-SJ) framework. Our IP-SJ approach helps illuminate how IP law and administration affect opportunities for access, inclusion, and empowerment through IP endeavor, part...

[W]e now have the option for all humanity to “make it” successfully on this planet in this lifetime. … Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment. R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path (1981) We are just at the beginning of the AI revolution and already it is transforming human society. In...

Trade secret protection is an important part of IP and IP social justice theory supports its protection, albeit with some carefully calibrated limitations that recognize that a customer list does not present the same sorts of risks as a computer program driving a car. In the balance of this chapter, I sketch IP-SJ and trade secrets considerations w...

This chapter provides a brief introduction to intellectual property (IP) social justice theory and guidance on how to research social justice issues in IP. Included are tips for finding social justice issues in IP law and administration; a toolkit for addressing such issues; and examples of the process in use. IP social justice examines IP law and...

In this chapter we explore IP protectability of what may be broadly termed “folk music,” though that is a term fraught with ambiguity, from an intellectual property social justice (IP-SJ) framework. Our IP-SJ approach helps illuminate how IP law and administration affect opportunities for access, inclusion, and empowerment through IP endeavor, part...

a1 Christen B'anca Glenn aa1 1 Tex. A&M L. Rev. 959 (2014) Copyright (c) 2014;Steven D. Jamar; Christen B'anca Glenn Fan fiction is amateur writing that imaginatively reinvents a work in pop culture while maintaining the identifiable aspects of the preexisting work. 1 Fans of various books, films, and television series write their own versions of t...

This article examines the role of copyright in mediating the access to information with particular emphasis on special aspects arising in the context of the Internet and information technologies from the perspective of social justice principles of inclusion and empowerment. If copyright law, policy, and administration are properly calibrated to add...

Innovation, the creating of new things or processes, is a core factor in development, but it is not sufficient for development; the innovations must be exploited effectively in the marketplace. An intellectual property regime that favors too strongly one interest over another, as for example on the one hand by making the property holder’s interests...

A cornerstone of the human rights movement is establishing the rule of law; without the rule of law, the very meaning of the term rights dissipates. A foundational principle of the rule of law is governmental transparency, i.e., governments operating not secretly, but openly. One aspect of this transparency is ready access to the law. Having open a...

Because religion is a potent force for many people, it affects the content, structure, and function of law and the law's relationship to ordering society. The complexity and variability from state to state of the relationships of religion to social, governmental, and legal systems is remarkable. This variability and complexity stems from several ma...

This Article discusses the importance of grounding a law school intellectual property institute on social justice. This is not to say that all IP institutes at all law schools either are or should be so grounded. We assert the more limited proposition that such grounding is valuable and, in the case of the IP institute at Howard University, central...

In this Article, I evaluate the copyright doctrine of fair use and the use of injunctions to enforce copyrights in the context of religion in light of the Supreme Court decisions in Employment Division v. Smith and Eldred v. Ashcroft, and in light of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), the Congressional response to Smith. I conclude that...

This article explores the evolving copyright landscape in the Digital Information Age and places the Google Library Project (“Google Books,” “the Project”) and the Google Settlement Agreement within that terrain. We attempt to demonstrate how this initiative - the mass digitization of the nation’s storehouse of printed texts with the goal of making...

In the online social networking context, the constitutional purpose of the Copyright Clause will best be served by establishing relatively clear guidelines through legislation and court decisions that protect the ability of users and creators of works, including derivative works, to utilize the full capabilities of social networking technologies an...

This Essay examines the extent to which some of the seminal ideas and principles from and underlying Brown v. Board of Education can be used to provide a perspective that may help develop intellectual property law in ways that advance the cause of social and economic justice. The social justice-conscious approach of the Court in Brown can inform ou...

In this article I develop the idea of a lawyering approach to development as distinguished from the Weberian top-down approach which has failed so frequently in the past. I then examine my approach within the context of the relationship between computer sector development and the protection of intellectual property.

Words matter. The speech we choose to utter affects those around us. The way we choose to express our ideas sometimes matters as much as the ideas themselves. This is true in all aspects of lawyering and, indeed, in life. Religions have long recognized the power of words. From the Biblical “in the beginning was the word” to the Muslim sanctity of t...

This article demonstrates that at the heart of Aristotle's Rhetoric is deep instruction in how to make your arguments resonate most effectively with the audience - how to make a psychic connection between the speaker and the audience is the core, unifying theme of the whole Rhetoric. In demonstrating this thesis, I focus primarily on how, to Aristo...

In the first chapter of their excellent book, Minding the Law, Anthony Amsterdam and Jerome Bruner provide an Invitation to a Journey to make the already familiar strange again. They examine four common skills of lawyers from a new perspective: categorizing, rhetoric, narrative, and culture. In examining their ideas, I apply them to various constit...

This article examines the problem of balancing several core interests: (1) society's interest in eliminating unfair employment discrimination including discrimination on the basis of religion; (2) an employee's interest in seeking, obtaining, and holding employment free from unfair discrimination; and (3) an employer's interest in the employer's fr...

This article examines the sources of the human right to health and traces the contours of it. It seeks to develop a standard against which conduct of states can be measured. The author articulates two standards. One is the aspirational, political version of the right under which the state is to do what it can do to advance the health of the people....

This article examines the extent to which traditional Islamic law (sharia) affects the ability of Islamic states to protect intellectual property. The article includes a brief introduction to some of the basic principles of Islamic law and then applies them to general standards of intellectual property protection. It then uses Egyptian law to illus...

This essay seeks to illuminate some of the limits of formal logic in a legal system through exploring some of the logic problems in the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). Religious freedom is perhaps uniquely apt for examining the limits of logic in the law for two reasons. First, religious beliefs are based on faith and non logical or extra...

About three years ago, the Association of Legal Writing Directors (ALWD), an organization of more than 200 members representing approximately 150 law schools, undertook the ambitious project of developing and publishing a new legal citation manual. In early 2000 the years of work came to fruition when the ALWD Citation Manual 2 was published by Asp...

The advent of the Multistate Performance Test (MPT) caused me to consider giving a final examination in Howard's first-year Legal Reasoning, Research, and Writing (LRRW) course. 2 As I investigated the MPT and learned its aims and content, I decided that it, or an exam like it, could be an effective teaching tool. This article retraces my thinking...