I have the great joy of having been invited to the University of New Hampshire/Franklin Pierce’s Intellectual Property Scholars’ Roundtable on the Constitutional issues associated with I.P. law. I wanted to mention briefly the great value of this kind of conference. In the room are about twenty-five scholars who study various aspects of I.P. law. About a dozen of us are presenting an issue on which we are currently working and soliciting questions and comments from everyone else. I am not presenting a paper this year, so I can sit back a bit and think about the roundtable-style conference and its value to our scholarship in addition to absorbing the content of the presentations.
Topics at the conference have been limited to those I.P. issues associated with constitutional questions. To give an idea of the breadth of the topics covered, we have discussed the First, Second, Fifth, Seventh, Eleventh and Fourteenth Amendments as well as the Commerce, I.P., and Supremacy Clauses of the main document — and the conference isn’t over. Some of the most fascinating discussions have occurred when the interconnection of the different Constitutional provisions are discovered. In at least one time, it was exactly that. I don’t think any of us had thought about the connection raised before.
Indeed, this discovery of new interconnections is why the roundtable is such a valuable type of conference. The standard conference where papers are presented, mostly as finished works, has its value in dissemination of the information developed in the paper, but it doesn’t serve as the same incubator for new ideas. Indeed, where the research has been reduced to an article, it is often more informative to read the paper instead of hearing an oral presentation of it. For the roundtable conference, on the other hand, we get the opportunity to have our colleagues serve as idea editors. Whose scholarship wouldn’t be made better by that?
Topics at the conference have been limited to those I.P. issues associated with constitutional questions. To give an idea of the breadth of the topics covered, we have discussed the First, Second, Fifth, Seventh, Eleventh and Fourteenth Amendments as well as the Commerce, I.P., and Supremacy Clauses of the main document — and the conference isn’t over. Some of the most fascinating discussions have occurred when the interconnection of the different Constitutional provisions are discovered. In at least one time, it was exactly that. I don’t think any of us had thought about the connection raised before.
Indeed, this discovery of new interconnections is why the roundtable is such a valuable type of conference. The standard conference where papers are presented, mostly as finished works, has its value in dissemination of the information developed in the paper, but it doesn’t serve as the same incubator for new ideas. Indeed, where the research has been reduced to an article, it is often more informative to read the paper instead of hearing an oral presentation of it. For the roundtable conference, on the other hand, we get the opportunity to have our colleagues serve as idea editors. Whose scholarship wouldn’t be made better by that?
I would like to heartily endorse the round table conference, or the workshop it can also be known. In August we ran such a workshop at my law school at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, on the subject of international economic law and China. We invited expert participants from around the world to present their works in progress (with one even participating via Skype from Taiwan). The closed setting of about 20 participants permitted valuable exchanges and will result in a product of much higher quality than may be the case with symposia using the traditional panel presentation setting. The only audience were a few of the PhD students whose work is in that area.
Posted by: Colin Picker | September 30, 2012 at 03:46 AM