This Article offers a new way of thinking and talking about government secrecy. In the vast literature on the topic, little attention has been paid to the structure of government secrets, as distinct from their substance or function. Yet these secrets differ systematically depending on how many people know of their existence, what sorts of…
About half, probably more, of all patented inventions in the United States are never commercially exploited. Even many of the most commercially significant inventions take decades to come to market. In this Article, I contend that the patent system is substantially retarding the commercialization of valuable inventions. This result should not come as a surprise—the…
In 2006, thousands of soccer fans showed up to the World Cup game between the Netherlands and the Ivory Coast wearing pants in the colors of the Dutch national team. The pants had been given out as promotional gifts by a beer company. FIFA, the governing body of international soccer, objected. It claimed trademark rights…
This Article plays off the title of Thomas Grey’s well-known article, The Disintegration of Property, which argued in part that the ceaseless consensual fragmentation and recombination of property rights revealed some inner incoherence of the underlying private property institutions. I take the opposite position and treat this supposed disintegration of private property as evidence of…
The Supreme Court's recent decision in Pearson v. Callahan marked a turning point in a judicial experiment concerning § 1983 constitutional litigation, which began in 2001 with Saucier v. Katz. The experiment involved the doctrine of qualified immunity, an immunity from suit extended to state and local government officials (and to federal officials in Bivens…
The Fourth Amendment protects the “right of the people to be secure . . . against unreasonable searches and seizures,” but determining what this right means and how it should be vindicated has, to put it mildly, long been controversial. In fact, because of the “wide applicability of government intrusions, ranging from countless thousands of…
