12 - Legal Orders and Social Performance

Summary

This chapter focuses on the international extension of modern intellectual property, highlighting America's place in a regime of intellectual property that today is global. We trace the foundations for this global regime in international treaty frameworks, focusing on the legal parallels between treaties and contracts, as instruments of legal power. We briefly sketch the twentieth century developments of intellectual property law in the U.S., highlighting the juristic "solicitude" that is shown to intellectual property in U.S. lawmaking and international diplomacy. In the wake of World War II, the U.S. has used its position of global economic power to solidify commitments to intellectual property in a legal framework for trade relations that constitutes a super-national organization, the World Trade Organization, one that has facilitated global convergence in intellectual property law. New dangers and challenges are facing us today, in this globalized legal order, with the rise of artificial intelligence, and with patent claims extending very deeply into the social dimensions of human life, through computer-implemented inventions.