Innovation and Recovery

Crisis inevitably brings hope for recovery. The recent past has seen a great economic crisis and a crisis in the patent system. Precisely because crisis reveals the flaws in the old, recovery demands the new; it demands innovation. Economic crisis thus makes recovery in the patent system especially urgent because it reveals the degree to which continuing prosperity depends on society's ability to reorganize itself, to change, to innovate.

Towards that end, society should reconsider how our patent system makes judgments about invention. More specifically, Professor Duffy will seek to show through this lecture that the change most necessary for recovery in the patent system is a better theory of meritorious invention.