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The Westphalian paradigm suggests that sovereign nation-states formally constitute the only legitimate institutions of international policy creation, enactment, and enforcement. This paper seeks to highlight the policy potency of nongovernmental organizations by turning to a debate that questions the relevancy of the Westphalian paradigm. One of the most contentious points in this debate is the role and legitimacy of the various actors involved in globalization. The mechanism of ‘soft law’ is discussed, which allows non-state actors to participate — in an increasingly formalized way — in policy processes traditionally and even exclusively populated by sovereign nation states. Ostrom et al.’s Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework is used to clarify the institutional implications of non-sovereigns in policy formation. Ultimately, the soft law mechanism illustrates that the informal sector is gaining access — as and through NGOs — to powerful policy networks where formal sovereignty is decreasingly relevant.

Research tools used by scientists are essential for innovation in the biotechnology industry. In recent years, the patenting of such tools has skyrocketed with many scholars and organizations lamenting this development. They have focused, in particular, on reduced access to research tools and an “anticommons” characterized by multiple patentees exercising rights to exclude. This chapter addresses the question of whether scientists are able to use patented research tools. It argues that industry and academia have forged a relationship that, at least at the present time, has displaced the need for changes to the law. The chapter offers three proposals that could be implemented if the situation changes. First is to protect “experimentation” on the invention, which uses the invention to study its technology or design around the patent. Second, it offers an amendment to the Bayh–Dole Act (which encouraged the commercialization of nonprofit inventions) that would require universities and nonprofit institutions to reserve the right to use the invention for non-commercial research. Third, it recommends empirical study of user innovation among research tool innovators.

From the 1920s to the 1940s, scientists at Ottawa's National Research Council pursued an extensive program of research into the synthesis of plant hormones. Drawing on materials in the Canadian National Research Council (NRC) archives, this chapter examines how researchers struggled with the idea of patent, or indeed mobilized it as a public interest tool. It focuses on the correspondence between an NRC researcher, R. H. F. Manske, and his colleague P. W. Zimmerman at the Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI) at Cornell University. While the series of events revealed in the correspondence suggests that Manske was firmly embedded in scientific norms, Zimmerman and BTI challenged these and co-constructed the notion of the public nonprofit scientific research institution (i.e., nonuniversity) by deciding to patent and commercialize aggressively.

Lawyers play essential roles in creating and rolling out community postdisaster long-term recovery programs. Those programs involve counseling public entities about highly contested recovery decisions. They include designing new government and nonprofit institutions. They require developing new legal infrastructures, including statutes and local ordinances to implement a wide range of multimillion-dollar programs. They also demand drafting volumes of entirely new policies and procedures, contracts, and intergovernmental agreements to establish the legal relationships, the organizational responsibilities, and the ethics and values to guide newly minted recovery programs. The resulting legal framework can leverage significant funding to produce lasting improvements; or it can suffocate rebuilding in a regulatory straightjacket laced up at the local, state, and federal levels. This chapter highlights the strategies that may prove most successful in helping communities recover from catastrophic disaster, including specific examples of lawyers’ successes and failures in helping shepherd communities toward long-term recovery from major disasters.