Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy

Abstract

It is important to understand the limitations of looking at a subject through a breathless contemporary lens. There is no doubt that major technological innovation will always spark a rethinking of how property rights and tort liability should be organized. There is no need to develop sensible rules dealing with upper airspace until the airplane indicates that the ad coelum rule has costs that are not incurred when that space is incapable of commercial exploitation. There is no need to develop an elaborate law of copyright until copying becomes cheap enough that it is worthwhile to steal someone else’s literary or visual works. And the law of patent only becomes important when the mass production of various goods and services becomes possible. In all of these cases, the argument is never that these advances should be ignored. Rather, it is that the best way in which to deal with these new areas of law is to find the minimum extent to which the modification of existing rules and practices eliminates the difficulties that the new circumstances raise. In effect, the constructive use of the past becomes an indispensable tool for successful innovation in the future. That was the lesson that I took from my Contemporary Civilizations course at Columbia, and I think that it works well in all areas of intellectual endeavor.

First Page

95

Volume

41

Publication Date

2018

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