The protection of intellectual property (IP) is a question of life and death. COVID-19 vaccines, partially incentivized by IP, are estimated to have saved nearly 20 million lives worldwide during the first year of their availability in 2021. The vast majority of the benefit of this lifesaving technology, however, went to high- and upper-middle-income countries. Despite 10 billion vaccines having been produced by the end of 2021, only 4 percent of people in low-income countries were fully vaccinated. Paradoxically, IP may also be partly responsible for hundreds of thousands of lives lost in 2021, due to insufficient supply of vaccines and inequitable access during the critical first year of vaccine rollout, most notably in low-income countries that lacked the ability to buy or manufacture vaccines to save their populations. The contributors to this book diagnose a number of causes for the inequitable distribution of life-saving COVID-19 vaccines, from misguided reliance on intellectual property rights and voluntary mechanisms to share knowledge and vaccines, to the rise of vaccine nationalism and vaccine diplomacy, to unequal global intellectual property institutions that disenfranchise low-income countries and continue to reproduce colonial era dependency by poor countries on high income nations for life-saving technologies. Global experts herein suggest several reforms to prevent such inequity in the next pandemic, including delinking vaccine development from monopoly rights in technology, enhanced legal requirements to share publicly-funded technologies in pandemic times, and investment in technology transfer hubs and local vaccine manufacturing capacity in low and middle-income countries.

Intellectual property (IP) and social justice as a critical intellectual movement has come of age. This volume builds on more than two decades of work at the start of the twenty-first century by founding scholars who explored the human rights obligations and other social justice dimensions of the IP regime,1 and introduces new voices who take as their starting point that IP law is deeply implicated in structuring national, racial, gender, and other inequalities.2 The volume represents significant accomplishments. First among those is the recognition that IP rights do far more than the utilitarian economic theories that dominated twentieth century IP scholarship proposed. The old view of IP rights as narrow tools to incentivize the optimal production of creative goods is incomplete.3 Today scholars recognize the myriad ways that IP rights affect not only efficiency in innovation markets, but also human rights, including access to education4 and healthcare;5 freedom of speech;6 and distributive justice.7

Brands are the lingua franca through which individuals, celebrities, politicians, cities, and more distinguish themselves in a brand new world. Universities are no exception. Indeed, university brands are among the world’s most recognizable and valuable brands. Harvard rivals Hermès in prestige and exclusivity – and is certainly more elusive than the purchase of a tie or scarf. This volume explores the brand as media and mediator, the filter through which the modern university perceives, represents, and ultimately remakes itself. Today the brand goes far beyond a school name, coat of arms, logo, colors, or a mascot. The university brand seeks to capture and commodify as completely as possible the aesthetic value in belonging and participating in an academic community and its storied past. The aesthetic move in property seeks to capitalize on all thought and pleasure associated with one’s alma mater. The aesthetic university is a stage on which transformative life experiences are enacted, recast, and traded.