LL435E      Half Unit
Patents, Technology, and Global Justice

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

Should life-saving medicines be patentable if only the wealthy can afford them? Who should control Robot-ready plants controlled by patented technology that trained on sovereign genetic resources? Can we describe gene sequences as inventions in the same way as we describe computer programs? Why do pharmaceutical companies rely so much on patent protection? How should the pandemic treaty address patentability of pathogens? LL435E will enable you to have a doctrinally sound and critical approach to questions like these.

This module aims to provide a sound grounding in the legal protection of inventions and the technology-specific application of doctrine while exploring unprecedented and urgent challenges to justice raised by the control of technologies by patent holders. A critical objective of the course is to examine patent law as a site of struggle over knowledge and therefore power by interrogating how patent systems shape access to medicines, food security, and technological development. Based on UK and European patent law the course will consider technology-specific legal doctrine, patent prosecution and institutional features, and industry specific comparative perspectives. Through case studies spanning biotechnology, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, and biodiversity students will gain technical competence in patent law and the critical frameworks needed to evaluate whether patent law serves innovation or extraction, public interest or private in specific instances. The course will cover patentability and exclusions to patentability; direct and indirect infringement and defences such as research use will not ordinarily be covered. A scientific background is not necessary, tolerance for legally relevant descriptions of science and an aptitude for interdisciplinary understandings of technology is very welcome.

24-26 hours of contact time.

Students will have the option to produce a formative exam question of 2000 words to be delivered one month from the end of the module’s teaching session by email.

Bently, Sherman, Gangjee and Johnson Intellectual Property Law, OUP 2018, S Thambisetty The Social Life of Intellectual Property: Patents, Justice and Care Hart, forthcoming 2026, James Boyl,  The Public Domain: Enclosing Commons of the Mind Yale University Press 2008,  Pila The Requirement for an Invention in Patent Law Oxford University Press 2010, Spence Intellectual Property, Clarendon Law Series 2007, Robert Merges Justifying Intellectual Property Law Harvard University Press 2011, Jaffe  ;Lerner, Innovation and its Discontents Princeton University Press 2004, S Parthasarathy Patent Politics: Life Forms, Markets, and the Public Interest in the United States and Europe, University of Chicago Press 2017, Katharina Pistor The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality Princeton University Press 2019. 

Assessment Pathway 1

Essay (100%, 8000 words)

Assessment Pathway 2

Legal problems (100%)