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This chapter discusses the history of the intellectual property and its ethical and legal foundations. The chapter provides an overview of the U.S. intellectual property system and discusses patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, and ownership of research data. It also examines some key pieces of intellectual property legislation and intellectual property cases. The chapter also discusses some ethical controversies, such as patents on biological materials.Note: Nothing in this chapter should be taken as a legal advice. Engaging an intellectual property attorney is recommended in the event of contemplating issues related to a patents, copyrights, or trademarks.

The emergence of conservative public-interest law provoked controversy within the American right, where many leading legal intellectuals worried that conservative legal activism threatened conservative legal principles by asking courts to resolve political disputes. Conservatives, including Kit Bond of Great Plains Legal Foundation and Daniel Popeo of Washington Legal Foundation, began to debate the virtues and vices of public-interest law, shifts in US legal culture, and methods of thinking about the “rights revolution” that was initially sparked by the African American struggle for equality but eventually spread more broadly. At Washington Legal Foundation, Popeo articulated a variety of conservative counter-rights on social, cultural, and foreign policy issues. At Capital Legal Foundation, lawyer Dan Burt argued that conservative legal groups needed to challenge the rules and culture that had allowed public-interest law to flourish in the first place.

This chapter explores the legal foundations of arbitration. It draws upon four more or less competing propositions. The first is that any arbitration is necessarily national; it lives or dies according to the law of the place of arbitration (the territorial thesis). The second is that arbitration may be given effect by more than one legal order, none of them inevitably essential (the pluralistic thesis). The third is that arbitration is the product of an autonomous legal order accepted as such by arbitrators and judges. The fourth is that arbitration may be effective under arrangements that do not depend on national law or judges at all. Whether such arrangements qualify as legal orderings may be debated. The analysis gives an affirmative answer, with the result that the fourth proposition ultimately merges with and expands the second: it accounts for a feature of pluralism in the ascendancy.

This chapter deals with the prospects of public law in global governance. It analyses firstly the foundations of modern public law and considers how they are changed in the global setting. It asks whether they survive through the de-centring practices of States, detached from the legitimating grounds of the modern ‘idea of publicness’, and whether what it identifies as the duality of public law (in its State-related political and juridical strands) fades and decouples in the sphere of deracinated global legalities and regimes. It argues that the Constitution of the Public can only resurface by recomposing and re-coupling the legal/political duality found in the state. However, as case-by-case experience shows, this quest involves the safeguarding non-instrumental codes of law with the primary function of avoiding injustice in the inescapable interactions among legalities; that is the relationship between disembodied transnational/supranational orders and socio-political legal communities.

The Reagan era proved difficult for conservative public-interest foundations, which lost key legal talent to the administration and struggled to maintain the same level of fundraising without a Democratic administration to oppose. Mountain States Legal Foundation nearly collapsed after bringing a lawsuit about the cable television industry that proved unpopular with its board of directors, and Capital Legal Foundation went out of business after bringing a difficult libel action against CBS. But Pacific Legal Foundation won a major, precedent-setting case in the US Supreme Court. Nollan v. California Coastal Commission determined that regulators could not force a homeowner to grant public access to his dry beach in exchange for a building permit. And it showed that the Supreme Court wanted to determine when a government regulation might constitute the “taking” of private property without compensation.

In 1973, a group of California lawyers launched the Pacific Legal Foundation, a nonprofit, public-interest legal organization espousing conservative political principles. The group initially focused on welfare, education, and, especially, property rights. Over the next decade, Pacific made a name for itself defending the rights of property owners against government regulators—especially a statewide agency called the California Coastal Commission. Through lawsuits and political activism, Pacific Legal Foundation argued that environmental regulation and land preservation threatened traditional notions of property by subjecting it to such extensive regulation that it was rendered almost without value. Their work raised a serious question: to what degree was the realization that all plants and animals are part of an interconnected web of habitats and ecology compatible with the notion that people had the right to decide how to use their private property? Did ecological thinking inevitably lead to government control over the economy?

By the mid-1970s, Pacific Legal Foundation had inspired imitators. In Denver, a Mountain States Legal Foundation was formed in 1977 in order to battle the regulatory state on issues of concern to conservatives in the Rocky Mountain region. Sponsored by Colorado beer executive Joseph Coors and run by attorney James G. Watt, Mountain States Legal Foundation defended the interests of businesses who did work on federally owned lands. Watt’s work on the subject coincided with a Sagebrush Rebellion by Western politicians who hoped to shift control of the public lands from the federal government to the states. In both legal work and political mobilizations, right-wing groups called attention to the economic consequences of federal land ownership patterns in the Rocky Mountains. Because the government owned so much of the region, environmental regulations and management decisions shaped regional economic outcomes and provoked intense on-the-ground conflict.

The Hastings Center Guidelines for Decisions on Life-Sustaining Treatment and Care Near the End of Life was written for physicians, nurses, and other clinicians who care for patients facing decisions about life-sustaining treatment and patients nearing the end of life. These Guidelines are also intended to be useful to those responsible for the education of these clinicians, professionals who make institutional policy on care near the end of life. This introductory section describes the function and sources of ethics guidelines, including the ethical and legal foundations for these Guidelines.

As the act of constitution-drafting experiences as renaissance, the theoretical und legal significance of constitution-making as the basic and genuine power of the people deserves revisiting. Böckenförde outlines the problems involved in defining the constitution-making power of the people, a limit-concept where politics and law meet. It is more than a mere hypothetical presupposition explaining a particular constitution’s validity. The people’s constitution-making power is truly the source of a constitution’s legitimacy, not only in the hour of birth of a political entity but from there onwards. This constitution-making power also has the authority to abolish the constitution’s normative claim to validity. Though there are no legal limitations on the people’s exercise of pouvoir constituant, there are pre-legal bounds, such as the idea of pre-existing human rights. It is a question of the ‘living ethos’ in a political community to what extent the people consider themselves bound to such principles.

To school desegregation activists in the 1960s, school choice plans represented one of a series of tactics of avoidance or obstruction. Yet choice programs became part of school desegregation remedies and then became initiatives for varied school reforms. Political alliances and clashes around the issue of school choice color public perceptions even more than the actual effects of school choice on students’ achievement or social integration. School choice can enable both self-segregation or student mixing across many lines of difference. As a tool of school reform, school choice continues to hold promise and risks for those seeking equality and integration within schools while enhancing pluralism and respect for differences in society as a whole. Yet some forms of school choice could undermine equality goals unless they are accompanied by direct efforts to maintain and enforce these goals. Widespread perceptions that American schools are failing have fueled a major nationwide movement for school reform since the early 1980s. At the forefront have been business leaders who—worried about American competitiveness and the qualifications of the workforce for jobs requiring increasing technical skills—have brought conceptions of competition and innovation to the school reform initiatives. Parents and teachers, seeking greater control of local schools, have also energized the movement. Challenging established school bureaucracies and political arrangements, these reformers have pushed for performance standards, voucher systems to promote competition and consumer choices, site-based management, and other opportunities for innovation at the level of the individual school rather than the district or statewide system. One of the key themes pursued by a range of parents, teachers, business leaders, and other advocates as a motor for reform is parental choice. This concept combines a market-style consumer sovereignty idea with notions of personal liberty. School choice stimulates competition among providers, as parents look for benchmarks for assessing quality. As a result, states and localities have initiated institutional innovations. These include magnet and pilot schools, which draw students from an entire district by offering a special focus. Vouchers permit poor students to use public funds to pay tuition in private schools.