Stanford University Press Blog

Who's Controlling the Genie?

Robert Plotkin, Patent Lawyer and MIT, is the author of the newly released book “Genie Inside the Machine…” The book Is really innovative in bringing technological advances to the world of patent law.

A recent article in Technology in Review summarizes the book and states Plotkin’s assessment of the future in patented technology.

Genie in the machine describes how the digital age is expanding the possibilities of human invention. He gives the example of the Oral B toothbrush as a product of software design.  But there aren’t just toothbrushes in software production; Plotkin says there are many patents already granted to other products produced in part by software.

 The problem is that the patent system that has suited our industrial society for 100’s of years is now becoming outdated and doesn’t compensate for our technological advances. The problem became apparent in the 1990’s when software produces fought for control over the market and thousands of patents were granted. Plotkin says that the patent system has to be revolutionized so that trivial patents are not granted, stifling real ingenuity.

The author  does think that this is a problem that deserves our immediate attention. With hope for the future, Robert Plotkin assures you that this groundbreaking technology will not replace human ingenuity, but rather augment it, enabling people to boost their inventive abilities to previously undreamed-of heights.  Without talented individuals to communicate effectively with computers (or rub the lamp), the genie is useless.  “One slip of the tongue and you may find yourself turned into a toad rather than bathed in riches,” he explains.

Review of Bleached Faith Outlines Church & State Debate

Caren Dubnoff, professor of political science at College of the Holy Cross, recently profiled Steven Goldberg’s Bleached Faith: The Tragic Cost When Religion Is Forced into the Public Square (2008) for Law and Politics Book Review.

In his brief volume, Steven Goldberg supports the separation of Church and State by challenging, as Dubnoff puts it, “the argument that because religion has a positive effect on moral values and civic virtue, it merits government support. He also responds to the argument that barring religion from the public square violates the free exercise rights of the religious.”

Dubnoff goes on to explain: “Goldberg builds his argument around three cases: the controversy over the posting of the Ten Commandments; the argument over the introduction of Intelligent Design in school biology classes; and the argument over holiday displays.”

This reviewer’s conclusion is that Bleached Faith is based on very current issues and provides a useful rebuttal to those leaning against the separation of Church and State.

One Blueprint for Obama

The Wall Street Journal reviewed Erwin Chemerinsky's book, Enhancing Government. John McGinnis writes, "Mr. Chemerinsky sketches a vision of federalism that would empower government at all levels and delight civil plaintiffs and criminal defense lawyers of every description. The great virtue of Mr. Chemerinsky's book is that it serves as a blueprint for the Obama administration and a fair warning to its opponents." The full text of the review can be found here.

McGinnis argues that in making a case for empowering state and local government to deal with social problems, Chemerinsky ignores the distinction between national and local consequences of the legislation.

"When Congress has gone to the trouble of establishing a regulatory apparatus, and its regulators have arrived at a judgment about the safety of a medical device, the court is right to infer that Congress does not want states simply to "opt out" of the judgment if they like."

While it is true that Chemerinsky's proposal puts limits on federal power, it empowers every level of government to deal with social problems, a point that the review fails to mention. In his view, federal power should address national problems like environmental protection and violations of civil rights, while state power can be strengthened in areas such as consumer privacy and employee protection. So the proposal reserves a place for federal action. And, Chemerinsky presumably would agree with federal legislation that seeks to put a ban on hazardous medical devices.

The book passionately argues for a different vision: federalism as empowerment. It lays a challenge to the Court—and to the next president—to approach their decisions with the aim of advancing liberty and enhancing effective governance.

A government report released earlier this week confirmed that the American economy will see a recession in 2008. Families across the country are facing foreclosure on their homes, and the dollar is at record lows.  In an article in The Chronicle Review, David Glenn asks why presidential candidates, especially Republicans, still propose tax cuts based on the now-debunked supply-side economic theory:

The hopes of the supply-side theorists of the 1970s, who proposed that revenue would often rise after tax cuts, have been thoroughly dashed by the last 30 years. Federal revenue fell after Ronald Reagan's 1981 tax cuts and again after George W. Bush's 2001 cuts. The vast majority of economists now say that tax cuts must be matched by spending cuts, or deficits will ensue.

For an answer, he turns to The Permanent Tax Revolt: How the Property Tax Transformed American Politics, released this week by Stanford University Press. Author Isaac William Martin argues that “Republican political leaders (falsely but successfully) interpreted Proposition 13's success in California in 1978 as a broad mandate for cutting income taxes as well as property taxes,” a policy that has shaped and symbolized the party every since.

Martin’s showcasing of how the Republican Party came to so deeply associate itself with tax cuts helps us understand why President Bush stands so firmly by his economic policies in the face of economic upheaval. 

The Stake of a Reputation

We all have secrets, but the ease with which information is transmitted via YouTube, MySpace, and Google has made keep them much more difficult. Lawrence Friedman’s Guarding Life’s Dark Secrets, discussed in a recent Wilson Quarterly review by Gary Alan Fine, looks at our cultures attitudes about reputation by examining when the courts have protected our secrets and when they have not.

We tend to think of those our ancestors as being better behaved than we are today, but Friedman argues that their comportment did not always match the reputation that they carefully maintained. “Friedman emphasizes that life in ­19th-­century America was rough. Heavy drinking, fighting, and con games were com­mon in public spaces.” Society, and the laws that supported it, recognized that this behavior could never be completely suppressed.

“What resulted, [Friedman] says, was the ‘Victorian compromise,’ the practice by which (most) respectable citizens were protected from being discredited by their moral lapses, except when public notice demanded otherwise. It was a culture of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ For the middle class and the elite, it was a world of second chances. The working class served as society’s scapegoats. Thus, even though gambling was common at all levels of society, it was the gambling dens of the poor that were raided, not the salons of the wealthy. These miscreants, not so different from their fellow citizens, were discredited, isolated, and ­stigmatized.”

Today’s compromise has changed, as it is much more difficult to hide transgressions—instead, our public figures have perfected the art of the apology.

You can read the entire review here.

The Final Decision

This week, the Supreme Court once again revisited the question of the death penalty, this time to determine if the method used by most states, lethal injection, is cruel and unusual.

Dead Certainty by Jennifer Culbert, recently released by Stanford University Press, examines the history of Supreme Court death penalty cases, providing a solid background for understanding the debate currently taking place in the Court. Culbert focuses not on the ethical and moral issues surrounding the death penalty, but rather looks at the Supreme Court’s decisions in these cases to understand how the Justices understand judgment. She finds that the death penalty began to be questioned when the Supreme Court started looking for an external, objective truth to justify each death sentence, as opposed to trusting a jury to weigh the idiosyncrasies of each individual case.

The case currently before the Supreme Court also rests on the search for certainty when we cannot access infallible, external truth: the Court is considering whether the third and final shot in a lethal injection is sometimes unnecessarily and cruelly painful when the second renders inmates unable to signal that they are in pain.

 

Crime and Punishment

Under the Bush administration, the policing power of the US government has expanded extensively, from warrant-less wiretapping programs to enhanced interrogation techniques. In such an atmosphere, the growing field of police science is gaining attention.

The New Police Science examines the many meanings and components of police, from the preventive actions taken by the state (laws, regulations, etc.) to the enforcement and punishment of criminal justice systems. The editors point out:

it is clear that recent developments in the United States have suddenly made this…highly relevant. Agamben’s theorization of modern life as variations on the theme of ‘camp,’ with the concentration camp regarded not as an exception but as the foundation of law and sovereignty, seemed like one of those radical rants that Italian Marxists are famous for—until Guantánamo.

This collection, recently reviewed in Law & Politics Book Review, provides a valuable perspective for anyone interested in the ways power and justice are changing in modern America.

The Law and Harry Potter

In Lex Populi [“law of the people,” playing off of vox populi], William MacNeil looks at how popular culture portrays and interacts with ideas of jurisprudence, examining Fight Club, The Lord of the Rings, the debate over Terri Schiavo’s right to die, and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. When discussing Harry Potter, MacNeil draws our attention to the existence of house elves, small creatures who are enslaved to do their human masters’ bidding unless freed by being presented with clothing.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire reveals that there are hundreds of house elves working at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, the shining light of all that has been good in Harry’s life. While Harry’s friend Hermione tries to free the house elves from their enslavement, the other students seem unconcerned, as do the house elves themselves, who appear to relish the opportunity to serve well and regard freedom with horror.

MacNeil contrasts the reactions of two house elves to freedom to show the difficulty of finding a legal system that meets the rights of all members of a community. Dobby relishes his freedom, but he “feels that, as far as freedom goes, there can be too much of a good thing. For instance, when Dumbledore offered to pay him ten Galleons a week—a standard wizarding wage… Dobby ‘beat... him down’ to one Galleon. Winky, on the other hand, perceives her freedom as a “‘disgrace’ and a source of ‘shame.’”

MacNeil argues that the novel shows “that rights discourse, and indeed the law itself, might be highly problematic strategies for change, something that you can’t live with, and can’t live without. For how do you change a system’s status inequities—its gender, race, and class ‘intersections’ overdetermined in the figure of Winky—through the very instrument of those inequities, namely the law?”

What should we do about immigration?

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

What do these words mean today? Yesterday, the latest immigration bill died in the senate, signaling that the government, and the country, will continue to look for a direction for our immigration policy.

In this context, it is useful to examine how other countries have dealt with the pressures and benefits of immigration. In The Boundaries of the Republic: Migrant Rights and the Limits of Universalism in France, 1918-1940, Mary Dewhurst Lewis turns to interbellum France to examine Europe's first guest worker program and the transformations it underwent as France experienced difficult economic and political circumstances. There is much, she argues, that could be used in our current dilemma from the lessons that France learned in the years before the Second World War.

One of the lessons Lewis presents is that there is not a straightforward connection between the integrity of a country's sovereignty and the extent of migrant rights. The reality is a complex negotiation between various interests and levels of power in which there is always a combination of benefit and loss. There can be no straightforward answer our current dilemma, making the nuances of France's journey – first admitting nearly two million immigrants, and then expelling 93,000 of them – relevant and engaging.