Description

This paper explores the growing importance of information‐based “private governance” that incorporates elements of intellectual property and environmental law. Trademarks are deeply implicated in forms of private environmental governance that have emerged in response to economic globalization. These developments challenge the prevailing theory of trademarks and its viability in a world where markets, politics, and social policy are intertwined.  At the same time, battles over the scope of trademark rights— ignited by overreaching corporate branding strategies—have elevated a reactionary turn in trademark theory that reduces trademarks solely to their source‐identification function. The paper argues that public interests, specifically environmental quality and sustainability, impacted by globalized markets also merit consideration, and that the normative ends of private environmental governance should factor into trademark policy.

About The Speaker

Professor Graeme Austin is a Professor of Law at Melbourne University, and is Chair of Private Law at Victoria University of Wellington.  He returned to Australasia in 2010, after serving for nearly ten years as a tenured professor at the University of Arizona, most recently as the J Byron McCormick Professor of Law, where he co‐convened the Intellectual Property programme.

He has been a visiting professor at Wuhan University, the University of Western Ontario, and as the Yong Shook Lin Professor of Intellectual Property at the National University of Singapore. His scholarship has been published in the Law Quarterly Review, NYU’s Annual Survey of American Law, the Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, and the International Review of Intellectual Property and Competition Law.  He is the author (with Larry Helfer at Duke) of Human Rights and Intellectual Property: Mapping the Global Interface (Cambridge 2011), on which his 2017 NUS course will be based.