The Suffolk University Law Review welcomed Professor Ruth Okediji as the featured speaker for the 128th Donahue Lecture. Professor Okediji is Codirector of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and the Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She addressed “Intellectual Property in a Just Society,” and argued that the current IP system fails to adequately account for unacknowledged—but very real—welfare costs. Using the development of medications to treat HIV/AIDS, ebola, and COVID-19, Professor Okediji evaluated the “costs” of innovation in the current IP landscape and demonstrated that the current system is not “morally neutral” as was intended. She observed that “access to medicines is no longer just a question of where you were born it’s a very much a question of the socio-economic conditions into which were born, and the COVID-19 vaccine made that clear.” Professor Okediji concluded with the powerful observation that:
There are structural conditions that produce a lack of access—both in the United States and around the world—and the persistence of the vaccine gap reflects the limits of human rights and the urgency of reformulating questions at the interface of human rights and intellectual property. There is a network of rules and norms and institutions that for too long have sustained a global order that disables democratic equality and, on the other hand, enables economic dependency. And that is not a world that we really want to live in and call just.
Recording:
https://suensemble.suffolk.edu/Watch/k9Y5WyKx
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