Aural History

Aural History is an anti-memoir memoir of encountering devastating grief that uses experimental storytelling to recreate the winding, fractured path of loss and transformation.Written by a thirty-something psychotherapist and queer theorist, Aural History is structured as a sequence of three sections that each use different narrative styles to represent a distinctive stage in the protagonist’s evolving relationship to trauma. Aural History explores how a cascade of self-dissolving losses crisscrosses a girl’s coming of age.Through lyric prose, the first section follows a precocious tomboy whose fierce attachment to her father forces her, when he dies and she is twelve years old, to run the family bakery business, raise a delinquent younger brother, and take care of a destructive, volatile mother.In part two, scenes narrated in the third person illustrate a high-achieving high school student who is articulate and in control except for bouts of sudden and inchoate attractions, the first of which is to her severe and coaxing English teacher.The third story tells of her relation with a riveting, world-famous professor, interspersed with a tragic-comic series of dialogues between the protagonist and a cast of diverse psychotherapists as she, now twenty-five years old and living in New York City, undertakes an odyssey to understand why true self-knowledge remains elusive and her real feelings, choked and incomplete.In what Phillip Lopate calls “an amazing document,” Aural History pushes the narrative conventions of memoir to capture a story the genre of memoir usually struggles to tell: that you can lose yourself, and have no way to know it

Aural History

Aural History is an anti-memoir memoir of encountering devastating grief that uses experimental storytelling to recreate the winding, fractured path of loss and transformation.Written by a thirty-something psychotherapist and queer theorist, Aural History is structured as a sequence of three sections that each use different narrative styles to represent a distinctive stage in the protagonist’s evolving relationship to trauma. Aural History explores how a cascade of self-dissolving losses crisscrosses a girl’s coming of age.Through lyric prose, the first section follows a precocious tomboy whose fierce attachment to her father forces her, when he dies and she is twelve years old, to run the family bakery business, raise a delinquent younger brother, and take care of a destructive, volatile mother.In part two, scenes narrated in the third person illustrate a high-achieving high school student who is articulate and in control except for bouts of sudden and inchoate attractions, the first of which is to her severe and coaxing English teacher.The third story tells of her relation with a riveting, world-famous professor, interspersed with a tragic-comic series of dialogues between the protagonist and a cast of diverse psychotherapists as she, now twenty-five years old and living in New York City, undertakes an odyssey to understand why true self-knowledge remains elusive and her real feelings, choked and incomplete.In what Phillip Lopate calls “an amazing document,” Aural History pushes the narrative conventions of memoir to capture a story the genre of memoir usually struggles to tell: that you can lose yourself, and have no way to know it

Does Patented Information Promote the Progress of Technology?

This Article investigates the relationship between the exclusive rights of patents, their information disclosures, and the impact they have on the development of future technologies. An examination of over 1000 patents that courts have held valid or invalid reveals a significant positive relationship. Specifically, the private rights and technological impact of patents rise and fall together, and moreover, both are related to the quantity of new and useful technical information contained in their disclosures. This Article identifies, for the first time, significant differences between the technological impact of valid patents and invalid patents, as measured by the future patented inventions that relate to the original patent. Additionally, significant differences are also observed based on the reason for a patent’s invalidity, with failure to disclose novel technical information corresponding to the weakest future impact. These differences are traced back to quantifiable variations in the information content of valid patents relative to patents invalidated for lack of novelty, obviousness, or indefiniteness. Finally, the analysis completes the circuit by linking the breadth of a patent’s exclusive claims, when validly supported by its disclosure, to the impact that patent has on future technological progress. Taken together, this study finds that the greater the information content of a patent’s disclosure, the higher the probability it will be held valid, and in turn, the larger its expected positive impact on the development of future technologies. This study contributes to patent and cumulative innovation scholarship by investigating how the information disclosure of patents relates both to the private value of their exclusive rights and to the technological progress they promote. Furthermore, this study uncovers significant differences between valid and invalid patents. Moreover, unique metrics are offered for directly analyzing the information content of any patent, providing tools for future research

Gaggle on the Gavel: Designing an Interactive Website to Create a Community of Lawyers

Law is behind other industries and professions in its implementation of technolo-gy that could make the practice of law and the delivery of legal services more ef-fective and satisfying. Although there has been considerable development in le-gal technology over the past few years, research identified the need for an interac-tive LinkedIn-style online community for lawyers to communicate other lawyers. Such a community would be particularly beneficial for solo practitioners, lawyers in small firms and lawyers in rural communities and would also provide a con-venient way to connect with lawyers for referrals and recommendations, for spe-cialized expertise and to develop contacts in different geographic locations. Ten-tatively titled Gaggle on the Gavel is an attempt to create such a community that would gather a number of attractive features and functionality under one umbrella and be compliant with the rules of professional conduct with respect to client con-fidentiality, security, advertising and solicitation. A system has been designed, prototyped and revised based on feedback from a focus group of lawyers

Patents at issue: the data behind the patent troll debate

https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/3156/Published versio

Venetian Trading Networks in the Medieval Mediterranean

Posted Online August 5, 2013.Network analysis can identify the crucial role that such social outcasts as Jews, Greeks, colonial subjects, and uprooted individuals played within the exclusive commercial networks of the Republic of Venice. These lower-rank merchants and brokers were able not only to manipulate legal, cultural, and religious categories to integrate themselves into the Venetian networks but also to abandon those networks when better economic opportunities arose

Merchant Guilds, Taxation and Social Capital

We develop a theory of the emergence of merchant guilds as an efficient mechanism to foster cooperation between merchants and rulers, building on the complementarity between merchant guilds’ ability to enforce monopoly over trade and their social capital. Unlike existing models, we focus on local merchant guilds, rather than alien guilds, accounting for the main observed features of their behavior, internal organization and relationship with rulers. Our model delivers novel predictions about the emergence, variation, functioning, and eventual decline of this highly successful historical form of network. Our theory reconciles previous explanations and the large body of historical evidence on medieval merchant guilds. In doing so, we also shed novel light on the role of the guilds’ social capital, and its importance for taxation, welfare, and the development of towns and their government in medieval Europe

Do NPEs Matter? Non-Practicing Entities and Patent Litigation Outcomes

It is widely argued that so-called “patent trolls” are corrupting the U.S. patent system and endangering technology innovation and commercialization at large. For example, a recent White House report argued that “trolls” hurt firms of all sizes and advocated for specific policies aimed at curtailing practices thought to be particularly harmful. Yet the existence and extent of any systematic effects of so-called “troll-like” behavior, and the implications of modern patent assertion practices by Non-Practicing Entities (“NPEs”), remains unclear. This article develops novel empirical evidence to inform the debate over NPEs on patent litigation. Specifically, we conduct a large-scale empirical analysis of more than 1,750 patent infringement cases decided by a judge or jury in U.S. district courts between 1995 and 2011. We focus on case outcomes, including findings of validity and infringement, and the distributions and values of resulting damage awards. We find some relatively small differences in terms of lower success rates and award values in cases where the patent holders are NPEs. Yet across the subset of cases in which damages are awarded to the patent holders, we find no significant differences in the distribution of awards between NPEs and practicing entities. Nonetheless, there are substantial differences in litigation behavior, success rates, and award values among types of NPEs (that is, universities, individuals, and Patent Assertion Entities (“PAEs”)). Moreover, we find evidence of certain NPEs engaging in strategic and rational patent acquisition, assertion, and settlement-licensing practices. We posit that these practices may reflect, or perhaps derive from, the economic separation of patent rights from their underlying technologies that is represented in NPE approaches to patent assertion

Patents at Issue: The Data behind the Patent Troll Debate

The debate over patent trolls \u27 is raging at full tilt and its fury is stoked by fundamental questions about patent assertion. Both sides are struggling to understand which patent assertion practices are consistent with the purpose of patent rights and which are abusive and result in net social costs. This Article addresses patent assertion concretely through empirical analysis of actual infringement awards. In particular, this Article studies all awards granted for findings of patent infringement in U.S. district courts between 1995 and 2011, and, with targeted analyses, focuses on cases involving patent assertion entities ( PAEs ). This Article specifically investigates certain principal assumptions about patent assertion which have been raised in the debate and further tests some of the leading policy proposals that are currently being considered. In so doing, this Article seeks to inform the patent troll debate and helps answer some of the key questions driving it. Part I below discusses the background for this study, addressing the current patent troll debate and some of the leading reform proposals that have been advanced. Part H describes the dataset used. Part III explains the empirical methodology used and highlights principal findings from previous work analyzing PAE and other nonpracticing entity ( NPE ) litigations. Part IV investigates PAE assertion practices directly and analyzes key questions that have been raised in the patent troll debate. Part V provides a summary of results and concluding remarks