Monday March 8, 2004
12:30 – 1:30 p.m.
Room 80 (Moot Courtroom)
Free and Open to all!
Lunch Served
The open access (commons) vs. private control debate is raging. It takes place in a number of fields, including the intellectual property and cyberlaw literatures, as well as broader public debates concerning propertization, privatization, deregulation, and commercialization. On the open access side, there is a frequent call for protecting the "commons," but the theoretical support for this prescriptive call is underdeveloped from an economic perspective. By contrast, on the private control side, there is robust economic theory in support of the market mechanism with minimal government regulation. In fact, many that oppose propertization, privatization, deregulation, and commercialization view economics (the discipline) with sincere suspicion and doubt. This creates a pitched battle that stretches beyond normative considerations and at times seems divided at the choice of methodology. I embrace economic theory as a utilitarian discipline, and develop an economic theory of infrastructure that better explains why, for a particular class of important resources, there is a strong normative argument for managing and sustaining the resources as commons. I will discuss briefly three specific areasóenvironmental, information, and Internet resourcesó to illustrate the theory; separate work applies the theory more concretely to these areas.
About the Speaker
Professor Brett M. Frischmann joined the faculty of Loyola University of Chicago, School of Law in 2002. Professor Frischmann graduated Order of the Coif from the Georgetown University Law Center. While in law school, he was an Olin Research Fellow in Law and Economics and the Executive Development Editor for the Georgetown International Environmental Law Review. After graduating from law school, he was an associate with the law firm of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering in Washington, DC, where his practice focused on communications, e-commerce and intellectual property law. Professor Frischmann then clerked for the Honorable Fred I. Parker of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Professor Frischmann has written on a wide variety of topics, including the economics of science and technology policy, international emissions trading, copyright misuse, privatization of the Internet infrastructure, judicial decision making in cyberlaw disputes, and the role of compliance institutions in international law. His current research is similarly wide-ranging, as demonstrated by the subject matter of his talk, social infrastructure and the comparative analysis of resource problems and solutions for environmental, information and Internet resources.