Vol. 94: Spring

In this Response to Professor Epstein’s Against Permititis: Why Voluntary Organizations Should Regulate the Use of Cancer Drugs, Professor Hall argues that while he agrees with Professor Epstein’s assessment of the problems with the FDA drug approval process, he disagrees with his proposed solution. Professor Hall argues that Professor Epstein’s solution—to reduce the FDA to an advisory/information role after Phase I testing—devalues the mission of the FDA and has already been rejected by the body politic. Instead, Professor Hall contends that the solution to problems with the FDA drug approval process is to work to improve and optimize the system, not to eliminate it. Full response here.

In this Response to Professor Fagundes’s Property Rhetoric and the Public Domain, Professor Perzanowski expresses skepticism about two assumptions underlying the argument for embracing property rhetoric to promote the public domain. This argument assumes, first, public recognition of social discourse theory as an account of property and, second, rhetorical advantages of social discourse theory that are comparable to those of more familiar notions of private property. Perzanowski concludes that the simple intuitive appeal of Blackstonian property cautions against styling the struggle for balanced copyright and patent policy as a debate over competing property interests.