Patent Infringement as Criminal Conduct
Criminal and civil law differ greatly in their use of the element of intent. The purposes of intent in each legal system are tailored to effectuate very different goals. The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Global-Tech Appliances, Inc. v. SEB S.A., 131 S. Ct. 2060 (2011), however, imported a criminal concept of intent — willful blindness — into the statute for patent infringement, a civil offense, despite these differences. This importation of a criminal law concept of intent into the patent statute is novel and calls for examination. This Article compares the purposes behind intent in criminal law with the purposes behind intent in patent law to demonstrate that this importation does not achieve the policy goals of the patent regime. Criminal law jurisprudence requires an intent element for three reasons: to ascribe a level of moral blameworthiness to an act, to separate criminal from civil liability, and to shield otherwise innocently acting defendants from criminal punishment. Patent infringement actions, by contrast, lack an intent element because they almost exclusively seek to remedy economic harms. The importation of criminal concepts of knowledge into the patent infringement statute may therefore lead to unwanted consequences, particularly, higher-than-warranted burdens of proof for patent holders. To this end, equating criminal mental states to civil ones risks treating patent infringement as criminal conduct. This Article concludes by proposing that courts should examine the purposes of mental state requirements on a statute-by-statute basis.
Jefferson Meets Coase: Land-Use Torts, Law and Economics, and Natural Property Rights
This Article questions how well standard economic analysis justifies the land-use torts that Ronald Coase popularized in The Problem of Social Cost. The Article compares standard economic analyses of these torts against an interpretation that follows from the natural-rights morality that informed the content of these torts in their formative years. The “Jeffersonian” natural-rights morality predicts the contours of tort doctrine more determinately and accurately than “Coasian” economic analysis.The comparison teaches at least three important lessons. First, a significant swath of doctrine, Jeffersonian natural-rights morality explains and justifies important tort doctrine quite determinately. Second, this natural-rights morality complements corrective justice theory by the substantive rights that tort’s corrective-justice features seek to rectify when wronged. Finally, standard economic tort analysis cannot prescribe determinate results without making simplifying assumptions more characteristic of moral philosophy than of social science.
The Area of Freedom, Security and Justice ten years on: Successes and future challenges under the Stockholm Programme. CEPS Paperbacks. June 2010
This book celebrates the tenth anniversary of the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ) by bringing together the views of key practitioners and policy-makers who have played an outstanding role in thinking about and shaping EU policies on freedom, security and justice. 
 
Ten years ago, the member states transferred competences to the EU for law and policy-making in the fields of immigration, asylum and border controls, and began the transfer process for criminal justice and policing. This decade of European cooperation on AFSJ policies has experienced very dynamic convergence, the enactment of a large body of European law and the setting-up of numerous EU agencies working in these domains. Such dynamism in policy-making has not been without challenges and vulnerabilities, however. As this collective volume shows, the main dilemmas that lie ahead relate to an effective (while more plural) institutional framework under the Treaty of Lisbon, stronger judicial scrutiny through a greater role for national courts and the Court of Justice in Luxembourg, better mechanisms for evaluating and monitoring the implementation of EU AFSJ law and a more solid fundamental rights strategy. The contributions in this volume address the progress achieved so far in these policy areas, identify the challenges for future European cooperation in the AFSJ and put forward possible paths for making more progress in the next generation of the EU’s AFSJ.