Berkman Luncheon Series >
25
2012
Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources
Brett Frischmann, Cardozo Law School
Tuesday, September 25th
12:00pm **please note this is different from our start usual time**
Wasserstein Hall, Milstein East C Room (2nd Floor)
RSVP required for those attending in person via the form below
This event will be webcast live and archived on our site shortly after.
Infrastructure resources are the subject of many contentious public
policy debates, including what to do about crumbling roads and bridges,
whether and how to protect our natural environment, energy policy, even
patent law reform, universal health care, network neutrality regulation
and the future of the Internet. Each of these involves a battle to
control infrastructure resources, to establish the terms and conditions
under which the public receives access, and to determine how the
infrastructure and various dependent systems evolve over time.
Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources
devotes much needed attention to understanding how society benefits
from infrastructure resources and how management decisions affect a wide
variety of interests. The book links infrastructure, a particular set of resources defined in terms of the manner in which they create value, with commons,
a resource management principle by which a resource is shared within a
community. The infrastructure commons ideas have broad implications for
scholarship and public policy across many fields ranging from
traditional infrastructure like roads to environmental economics to
intellectual property to Internet policy.
Economics has become
the methodology of choice for many scholars and policymakers in these
areas. The book offers a rigorous economic challenge to the prevailing
wisdom, which focuses primarily on problems associated with ensuring
adequate supply. The author explores a set of questions that, once
asked, seem obvious: what drives the demand side of the equation, and
how should demand-side drivers affect public policy? Demand for
infrastructure resources involves a range of important considerations
that bear on the optimal design of a regime for infrastructure
management. The book identifies resource valuation and attendant
management problems that recur across many different fields and many
different resource types, and it develops a functional economic approach
to understanding and analyzing these problems and potential solutions.
About Brett
Brett Frischmann’s expertise is in intellectual property and internet law. After clerking for the Honorable Fred I. Parker of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and practicing at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering in Washington, DC, he joined the Loyola University Chicago law faculty in 2002. He is currently a professor at Cardozo Law School and has held visiting appointments at Cornell and Fordham. A prolific author, whose articles have appeared in Columbia Law Review, Cornell Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, and Review of Law and Economics, among other journals, Professor Frischmann has focused recently on the relationships between infrastructural resources, property rights, commons, and spillovers.
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Last updated October 16, 2012