A building body of evidence reveals that the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) is granting a significant number of invalid patents that create inefficiencies and chill innovation. At least part of the blame can be placed on the design of the patent system, which places most of the costs associated with understanding the nature and novelty of a claim on the government patent examiner, rather than on the inventor. After considering how a range of inventors might react to this incentive system, we consider reforms that place stronger incentives on the inventor to justify a patent award.

This final orientation chapter in Part I explores how a legal system that fails to account for comprehension asymmetries can exacerbate preexisting impediments to cooperative communication. After identifying those legal settings where comprehension asymmetries are likely to be most severe, the chapter concludes by suggesting general reforms that strengthen the speakers' incentives to communicate cooperatively with their audience.

Nobel prize-winning economist Herbert Simon warned more than 70 years ago that if we did not find a way to manage the flood of information that threatens to overwhelm us, we would find ourselves unable to make sense of it. This short introductory chapter explores the various ways that legal architects have failed to heed Simon's warning in legal areas as diverse as consumer protection, financial regulation, patents, chemical control, and administrative and legislative process. A number of significant legal programs in the U.S. are designed to facilitate the sharing of complete information, yet these programs often neglect to ensure that the information is also comprehensible to the target audience.

Consumer protection law is notoriously imbalanced with respect to the superior ability of sellers to process information as compared to their customers. Yet despite the resulting comprehension asymmetries, the design of consumer contract law and disclosure requirements regularly fail to encourage sellers to communicate meaningfully with the target audience. This chapter explores how consumer protection law tacitly encourages incomprehensibility and proposes reforms which would provide increased incentives for meaningful communication between buyers and sellers.