How do universities treat patents, and how does patent law treat universities?
These are the main questions addressed by Peter Lee, Professor of Law at University of California, Davis, in his new article, "Patents and the University," forthcoming in the Duke Law Journal. Lee has written several articles on the effects of patents on university research and a more recent article examining the role of patents in university-industry technology transfer. Now Lee provides a comprehensive history of the relations between patents and universities, generally. In Lee's telling, this relationship is characterized by two parallel developments: increased use of patents by universities, on the one hand, and "internalization" of universities and university research into patent law, on the other.
