Innovation Law and Policy Workshop

2021 – 2022 Innovation Law and Policy Workshop

This workshop series involves the relation between law and technology, such as intellectual property, privacy, defamation, competition law, law and literature, globalization and social justice. The workshops are scheduled on Tuesdays from 12:30 - 2:00 pm. For the 2021-22 academic year, the workshops will be held remotely, through a zoom link, https://zoom.us/j/94878863997?pwd=WGdrRCtPZ3Y4Qnh5S3k5QUgwdUNuZz09.

If interested, please e-mail Angie Agulto at angie.agulto@utoronto.ca.

Below is the 2021-2022 schedule:

DATE

SPEAKER / TOPIC

October 5

Professor Angela Creager, Department of History, Princeton University
"Chemical Passports"

Prof. Angela Creager
 studies the history of 20th-century biomedical research. Professor Creager graduated from Rice University with a double major in biochemistry and English (1985) and completed a Ph.D. in biochemistry (1991) at the University of California, Berkeley, where she developed an interest in the history of biology. Supported by postdoctoral awards, she retrained as a historian of science at Harvard University and MIT, and joined the Princeton History Department in 1994. Her first book, The Life of a Virus: Tobacco Mosaic Virus as an Experimental Model, 1930-1965 (2002), shows how a virus that attacks tobacco plants came to play a central role in the development of virology and molecular biology. Her second book, Life Atomic: A History of Radioisotopes in Science and Medicine (2013), traces how and why artificial radioisotopes were taken up by biologists and physicians, and examines the consequences for knowledge and radiation exposure. She is also the co-editor of three volumes, most recently Science without Laws: Model Systems, Cases, Exemplary Narratives (2007). She currently directs the Shelby Cullom Davis Center on the theme, "Law and Legalities."

November 16

Professor Alain Pottage, Law, University of Kent/Sciences Po Law School
"After innovation: Climate change and intellectual property"

Before joining the Law School at Sciences Po, Alain Pottage was Professor of Law at the London School of Economics. He has held visiting positions at Cornell Law School, EHESS, Goethe University, Frankfurt, Griffith Law School, Harvard, and the University of Sydney. His research focuses on questions in the history and theory of intellectual property, and on the question of law in the Anthropocene.

November 30

Associate Professor Jennifer Tucker, Department of History, Wesleyan University
A “gun is a gun”? The neglect of innovation in U.S. firearms law

Prof. Jennifer Tucker is a historian of science, technology, law and visual culture who teaches in the History Department at Wesleyan University in Connecticut (USA). The author of Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science (2005) and co-editor of A Right to Bear Arms? The Contested Role of History in Contemporary Debates on the Second Amendment (2019), she has published over thirty scholarly articles and edited journals on topics including nineteenth-century science and industry, environmental history, evidence, the history of visual persuasion, history and theory of photography, gender and law, art and visual culture, and firearms museums and intersectional public history. She currently serves as Co-Chair of the Editorial Board of Radical History Review, Co-Editor of the Photography/Theory: Theory/Photography monograph series at Bloomsbury Academic Press, and Vice-President of the new nonprofit National Association of Firearms Historians and Museums.

January 18

Professor Mario Biagioli, School of Law and Department of Communication, UCLA
"The Dark Side of Openness: Inventing Environmental Ethics at Trump's EPA"

Prof. Mario Biagioli is a Distinguished Professor at the School of Law and Department of Communication, UCLA. His current book is Gaming the Metrics: Misconduct and Manipulation in Academic Research (MIT Press, 2020), https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/gaming-metrics.

February 1

Prof. Meg Leta Jones, Department of Communication, Culture & Technology, Georgetown University
"The Character of Consent: The History of Cookies and Future of Technology Policy"

Prof. Meg Leta Jones is an Associate Professor in the Communication, Culture & Technology program at Georgetown University where she researches rules and technological change with a focus on privacy, memory, innovation, and automation in digital information and computing technologies. She’s also a core faculty member of the Science, Technology, and International Affairs program in Georgetown's School of Foreign Service, a faculty affiliate with the Institute for Technology Law & Policy at Georgetown Law Center, a faculty fellow at the Georgetown Ethics Lab, and visiting faculty at the Brussels Privacy Hub at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Meg’s research covers comparative information and communication technology law, critical information and data studies, governance of emerging technologies, and the legal history of technology. Meg holds a Ph.D. in Technology, Media & Society from the University of Colorado, Engineering and Applied Science (ATLAS) and a J.D. from the University of Illinois College of Law.

February 15

Prof. Mariana Valverde, Department of Criminology, University of Toronto
"Governing Infrastructure in the Age of the 'Art of the Deal'"

Prof. Mariana Valverde will be talking about/from a forthcoming book with Routledge, Infrastructure: New Trajectories in Law (forthcoming, Spring 2022). The book covers, in accessible language, financial and legal techniques commonly used to plan and deliver large infrastructure projects: audits, bonds, credit ratings, public-private partnerships, etc. It also reflects on the larger significance of the passing of ministries of public works in favour of infrastructure agencies such as Infrastructure Ontario, Metrolinx, and Partnerships BC.

March 1

Mr. Haris A. Durrani, Department of History, Princeton University
"Inventing Syncom: Public, Private, Global"

Mr. Haris A. Durrani is a PhD Candidate at Princeton University’s Department of History, in the Program in History of Science. He also holds a JD from Columbia Law School, an MPhil in History of Science from the University of Cambridge, and a BS in Applied Physics from Columbia Engineering. He studies the histories of law, technology, and US empire.

March 15

Professor Myles Jackson, History, Institute for Advanced Studies
"Ownability, Ownership, Knowledge, and Genetic Information in the United States"

Prof. Myles W. Jackson is the Ernst & Elisabeth Albers-Schönberg Professor in the History of Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. He has authored three books, Spectrum of Belief: Joseph von Fraunhofer and the Craft of Precision Optics (MIT Press, 2000), Harmonious Triads: Physicists, Musicians, and Instrument Makers in Nineteenth-Century Germany (MIT Press, 2006), The Genealogy of a Gene: Patents, HIV/AIDS, and Race (MIT Press, 2015), edited a volume Perspectives on Science: Gene Patenting (MIT Press, 2015), and co-edited a volume with Julia Kursell and Alexandra Hui, Music, Sound, and the Laboratory from 1750-1980 (University of Chicago Press, 2013). He has just finished a book manuscript on the improvement of the fidelity of tone color in early radio broadcasts and its culmination in the invention of an electronic musical instrument, the trautonium.

March 29

Associate Professor Gerardo Con Diaz, Science & Technology Studies, UC-Davis

 
2016 – 2017 Innovation Law and Policy Workshop

Date

Speaker

Topic

September 15, 2016

Mark Rose
University of California, Santa Barbara

Authors in Court: Stowe v. Thomas (1853)

September 22, 2016

Arti Rai
Duke University School of Law

Aggregating Legally-Encumbered Biomedical Data Silos: Lessons from Clinical Trial Data

October 13, 2016

Andrew Torrance
University of Kansas, School of Law

Empirical Comparison of the Canadian and US patent systems, inventors, companies, and technologies

October 27, 2016

Amy Kapczynski
Yale Law School

Order Without Intellectual Property Law: Open Science in Influenza

November 24, 2016

Dan Burk
University of California, Irvine
School of Law

On the Sociology of Patenting

February 9, 2017

Christopher Beauchamp
Brooklyn Law School

Technology's Trials  - a history of patent law in the U.S. from 1790 to 1952

March 2, 2017

Rebecca Eisenberg
Michigan Law

TBA

March 16, 2017

Oren Bracha
Texas Law

TBA

All workshops will be held from 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm in the Solarium at Falconer Hall (Room FA2), at the University of Toronto, Faculty of Law, 84 Queen's Park, Toronto, ON M5S 2C5.