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School of Law

QMIPRI Faculty Book Launch: Global Intellectual Property Protection & New Constitutionalism

When: Wednesday, March 30, 2022, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
Where: Online,

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Launch seminar for Global Intellectual Property Protection & New Constitutionalism (Oxford University Press, 2021), eds Jonathan Griffiths and Tuomas Mylly. Available for open access here.

16th February 2022, 1700-1830 GMT (1800-1930 CET / 0900-1030 Pacific / 1200-1330 EST)

Panellists

  • Professor Tuomas Mylly, University of Turku & Professor Jonathan Griffiths, Queen Mary Intellectual Property Research Institute (introduction by the editors)
  • Professor Graeme Dinwoodie, Global Professor of Intellectual Property Law, Chicago-Kent College of Law (commentator)
  • Professor Uma Suthersanen, Professor of Global Intellectual Property Law, Queen Mary Intellectual Property Research Institute (commentator)

The constitutionalization of intellectual property law is often framed as a benign and progressive integration of intellectual property with fundamental rights. Yet this is not a full or even an adequate picture of the ongoing constitutionalization processes affecting IP. Global Intellectual Property Protection & New Constitutionalism, written by international experts and covering a range of different areas of intellectual property law, takes a broader approach to the process. Drawing on constitutional theory, and particularly on ideas of “new constitutionalism”, the chapters engage with the complex array of contemporary legal constraints on intellectual property law-making. Such constraints arising in international intellectual property law, human rights law (including human rights protection for right-holders), investment treaties, and forms of private ordering.

This collection aims to illuminate the complex role of this "constitutional" framework, by analysing the overlaps, complementarities, and conflicts between such forms of protection and seeking to establish the effects that this assemblage of global and regional norms has on legal reform projects and interpretations of IP law. Some chapters take a broad theoretical perspective on these processes. Others focus on specific situations in which the relationship between intellectual property law and broader "constitutional" norms is significant. These contexts range from Art 17 of the EU's Digital Single Market Directive, to the implementation of harmonized trade secrets protection, from the role of Canada's Charter of Rights to the impact of the social model of property in Brazil.