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The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.

This chapter provides an overview of five modes of intellectual property (IP) protection – patents, designs, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets – available in the United States, the European Union, and Japan. After describing the purposes of and principal differences among the five types of IP protection and outlining the advantages of each form, the chapter provides country- and region-specific information. The authors highlight the aspects of IP law in which international harmonization has, or has not yet, occurred, and offer insights into the relative advantages of various national and regional IP protection systems.

This chapter provides an overview of the five main modes of intellectual property (IP) protection – patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, and designs – available in the United States, the European Union, and Japan. After describing the purposes of and principal differences among the five types of IP protection and outlining the advantages of each form, the chapter provides country- and region-specific information. The authors highlight the aspects of IP law in which international harmonization has, or has not yet, occurred, and offer insights into the relative advantages of various national and regional IP protection systems.

This paper examines the evolution of Intellectual Property (IP) commercialization in historical perspective. IP Law imposes an incentive structure that determines the extent of societal investment in those assets. From their inception at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, IP has expanded due to the introduction of new technologies. Property rights allocation over these assets has traditionally been assigned to governments centralizing the recognition of such property. For a long period of time, government intervention was critical to allow IP commercialization; hence, the political economy of IP was dictated by the prevailing ideology of policymakers in favor or against market transactions. The resulting clash of ideologies has marked the position of developing countries seeking exclusions from open IP commercialization to obtain temporary relief from foreign competition of technology producing countries, as well as that of industrialized countries, seeking to export their technologies overseas. The emergence of blockchain technology, as a decentralized transaction exchange protocol that makes intermediary centralized institutions (i.e. governments) certifying IP irrelevant over a large portion of intellectual property (i.e., trade secrets and copyrights) will create revolutionary institutions facilitating IP commercialization, such as NFTs. We examine this historical evolution in the context of legal institutions governing intellectual property transactions and technology transfer.

This chapter is intended to elaborate on the existing academic literature addressing the migration of constitutional ideas. Through an examination of ongoing efforts to enshrine “defamation of religion” as a violation of international human rights, the author confirms that the phenomenon of migration is not restricted to positive constitutional norms, but rather also encompasses negative ideas that ultimately may serve to undermine international and domestic constitutionalism. More specifically, the case study demonstrates that the movement of anti-constitutional ideas is not restricted to the domain of “international security” law, and further, that the vertical axis linking international and domestic law is in fact a two-way channel that permits the transmission of domestic anti-constitutional ideas up to the international level.

In reaching the findings presented herein, the chapter also adds to the universalism–relativism debate by demonstrating that allowances for “plurality consciousness” on the international level may in certain instances undermine fundamental norms previously negotiated and accepted as authoritative by the international community. From this perspective, the movement in favor of prohibiting “defamation of religion” is not merely a case study that helps to expand our understanding of how anti-constitutional ideas migrate, but also indicative of a reenergized campaign to challenge the status, content, and stability of universal human rights norms.

Within the field of international relations, global environmental governance is frequently discussed in terms of “international regimes,” defined as “social institutions that consist of agreed upon principles, norms, rules and decision-making procedures, and programs that govern the interaction of actors in specific issue areas” (Young, 1997, pp. 5–6). Viewed from the regime theory perspective, nation-states are seen as territorially bounded entities with a monopoly on the use of (economic or military) force (Agnew, 1999). As a result, they are assumed to have primary authority in matters of global environmental governance. It is nation-states that engage in the negotiation of international treaties (in which the elements of a regime may be formalized), which are then taken home to be either implemented or ignored as the nation-state sees fit. Given that political power is defined by state boundaries within the regime approach, the internal politics of nation-states is considered to be of relatively little import in much of the literature. Aside from some interest in the concept of sovereignty (Litfin, 1998), the notion of transgovernmental coalitions (Risse-Kappen, 1995; Slaughter, 1997), and two-level games (Putnam, 1988), in the main the state remains conceived as a homogenous and unitary actor, a “fixed territorial entity…operating much the same over time and irrespective of its place within the geopolitical order” (Agnew & Corbridge, 1995, p. 78). While a recent focus on knowledge and the role of nonstate actors in international regimes has led to a revision of the nature of interests, politics, and influence, the state remains defined in terms of national government, albeit with potential internal conflicts and the roles of domestic actors noted. Implicitly, regime theory assumes that subnational governments act under the (sole) influence and direction of national government. Critically, the potential role of subnational government is either ignored or subsumed within the nation-state.

The World Health Organization estimated that in 1999 roughly one-third of the world's population lacked access to essential medicines that would have saved or improved their lives. Our analysis focuses on how pharmaceutical product patents restrict access to essential medicines in developing countries. It is well established that pharmaceutical product patents provide little incentive for pharmaceutical companies to develop new medicines designed to treat diseases prevalent in developing countries or to market in developing countries those patented medicines developed to treat diseases prevalent in developed countries. Economists have developed theoretical models showing that these incentives could be changed if (1) developing countries provided intellectual property protection for new pharmaceutical innovations and (2) an international regulatory framework were established to facilitate pharmaceutical companies setting lower prices in developing countries and higher prices in developed countries for patented medicines. We develop an index of property rights in pharmaceutical innovations covering 129 countries from 1960 to 2005. It shows that in 1960 only a handful of countries provided significant protection for pharmaceutical innovations, but by 2005 over 95 percent of countries in our sample provided significant statutory protections. However, an international framework to allow pharmaceutical companies to price discriminate has not been put in place. We conclude that international price discrimination mechanisms, compulsory patent licenses, and regional patent buyouts are not viable mechanisms for providing access to essential medicines to patients in developing countries. Global patent buyouts are more likely to achieve this goal, as they are not founded on an impractical separation of pharmaceutical markets in developing and developed countries and they provide critical incentives to develop new essential medicines.

Border security is a crucial part of the country’s broader homeland security efforts. It is a multifaceted and complex issue which attempts to accomplish two seemingly contradictory objectives – the prevention of people and goods from entering the country, while at the same time, facilitating lawful travel and trade. Although it is primarily a federal responsibility, securing the border crosses over multiple homeland security domains, as well jurisdictions. In recent years, numerous strategies and structures have been implemented to foster a whole-of-government approach to border security. This chapter presents border security in the larger context of homeland security. It examines the strategies and coordinating structures developed to create a secured border and an overview of the interaction of law enforcement agencies at the various jurisdictional levels. Although these structures create a robust network of mutually supportive agencies to effectuate border security, a major strategic challenge to securing the nation’s borders still persists.

This chapter examines how international human rights law is shaping the politics of immigration. It argues that migrant human rights are neither conceptually nor practically incompatible with an international order premised upon state territorial sovereignty, and that the specific aesthetics of the contemporary international human rights system, namely its formalistic and legalistic tendencies, has facilitated its integration with a realm of policymaking traditionally reserved to state discretion. An exploration of two areas in the emerging field of migrant human rights traces the multi-scalar transnational legal processes through which these norms are formulated and internalized.

The social protests on the streets of indebted sovereigns in crises across the Eurozone have made debt restructuring an imperative. Further delay in achieving this expeditiously and equitably significantly exacerbates the social costs of crises from which current and future generations will struggle to recover. This article examines the feasibility of the drastic and widespread debt restructuring needed to resolve the problem in the face of existing private law sanctions that protect individual creditor rights. It relies on an analysis of US policy in the transition to a securitized market and of key sovereign debt cases to reveal the historical contingency of private law protections. It concludes by showing that the effectiveness of private law protections have always been constrained by the overriding imperative to achieve debt sustainability with negotiated and consensual workouts. This can be achieved in the Eurozone with statutory constraints on enforcement action pending the settlement of debt workouts as suggested in a recent proposal.