Mark Lemley and Machiavelli

Brian L. Frye, University of Kentucky College of Law, has published Machiavellian Intellectual Property. Here is the abstract.

In his controversial essay, Faith-Based Intellectual Property, Mark Lemley argues that moral theories of intellectual property are wrong, because they are based on faith, rather than evidence. This article suggests that Lemley’s argument is controversial at least in part because it explicitly acknowledges that consequentialist and deontological theories of intellectual property rely on incompatible normative premises: consequentialist theories hold that intellectual property is justified only if it increases social welfare; deontological theories theories hold that intellectual property is justified even if it decreases social welfare. According to Berlin, the genius of Machiavelli was to recognize that when two moral theories have incompatible normative premises, societies may be forced to choose between the theories. But Berlin observed that it is possible to adopt different moral theories in different contexts. This article suggests that we can reconcile consequentialist and deontological theories of intellectual property by adopting a consequentialist public theory and deontological private theories.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Of Hedgehogs, Foxes, and Theories

Ronen Perry, University of Haifa Faculty of Law; University of Oxford Faculty of Law, is publishing Pluralistic Legal Theories: In Search of a Common Denominator in volume 90 of the Tulane Law Review (2015). Here is the abstract.

This Essay embarks on a meta-theoretical project to provide a unifying philosophical framework for pluralistic legal theories. Put differently, it seeks to identify a structural common denominator for all pluralistic theories of law, with a particular emphasis on private law (torts and contracts). The Essay first rejects the notion of complementarity coined by Nobel Prize laureate Niels Bohr, and applied to legal theory by Izhak Englard. It then advocates the allegedly Thomist aphorism hominem unius libri timeo (“I fear the man of a single book”), and connects it to Isaiah Berlin’s renowned distinction between the hedgehog and the fox.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Isaiah Berlin and Enlightenment Constitutionalism

Jeremy Waldron, New York University School of Law; University of Oxford, has published Isaiah Berlin's Neglect of Enlightenment Constitutionalism. Here is the abstract.

One of the most important achievements of the Enlightenment is what I shall call Enlightenment constitutionalism. It transformed our political thinking out of all recognition; it left, as its legacy, not just the repudiation of monarchy and nobility in France in the 1790s but the unprecedented achievement of the framing, ratification, and establishment of the Constitution of the United States. It comprised the work of Diderot, Kant, Locke, Madison, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Sieyes, and Voltaire. It established the idea of a constitution as an intricate mechanism designed to house the untidiness and pluralism of human politics.

Yet Isaiah Berlin, supposedly one of our greatest interpreters of the Enlightenment, said almost nothing about it. The paper develops this claim and it speculates as to why this might be so. Certainly one result of Berlin's sidelining of Enlightenment constitutionalism is to lend spurious credibility to his well-known claim that Enlightenment social design was perfectionist, monastic, and potentially totalitarian. By ignoring Enlightenment constitutionalism, Berlin implicitly directed us away from precisely the body of work that might have refuted this view of Enlightenment social design.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.