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Challenging the effect of land reform

Man standing outside, wearing blue shirt.

Associate Professor Mekonnen Ayano

“One cannot overstate the importance of land in rural economies,” writes Associate Professor Mekonnen Ayano of his native Ethiopia. “Across the whole of sub-Saharan Africa … whether one can eat or not may depend on whether one has a plot of land to cultivate.”

And top-down strategies to develop the African nation’s economy, he says, imperil the delicate balance that has kept small farmers able to provide for their families—as well as maintain a people’s way of life.

“Life does not have meaning if you don’t have community,” Ayano says. “There is also culture. Culture is symbols, rituals; those are also linked to land. If you isolate people from land, one of the things that disappears is culture.”

Ayano is wielding his expertise in land use law to push back against reforms in Ethiopia, some of them advanced by international development organizations, that privatize land rights in the service of economic progress. What has been presented as reform, he argues, may increase tensions between ethnic and economic groups, and make it easier for rich speculators to buy out family farms in a way that undermines community stability.

His recent paper, published in the academic journal Law & Social Inquiry, is a reminder that good intentions don’t necessarily produce the intended results. Reforms meant to allow landholders to buy and sell their land free of government restriction, he says, may in practice make small farmers more vulnerable to predatory speculators. Further, he says, such efforts put too much faith in formal law at the expense of the handshake agreements that have allowed landholders to buy and sell for decades in a kind of shadow market, using such mechanisms as gifts, bequests, loans and leases.

Ayano brings to the issue both careful study of the laws of land reform—his doctoral dissertation at Harvard Law School examined similar issues of agrarian law in Ethiopia—and the gravitas of his deep connection with his home country. Not long after receiving his bachelor of laws from Addis Ababa University, he served on the trial bench of the Supreme Court of Oromia, a vast, mostly rural and agrarian district of central Ethiopia.

As he weighs in on land reform, Ayano knows that the stakes are high. Conflicting claims over land by various ethnic groups have fomented war and violence in the country, especially in rural areas.

“Reformers seem to lack humility,” he says. “They seem to overplay the idea that we can fix the problem. But one problem leads to another. You fix one problem, then find a bigger problem. It can be a process of trying to catch up with our problems without actually addressing them.”

Probing the promise, and implications, of technology

Man wearing glases, smiling, standing in front of a large screen mounted on a wall.

Professor Mark Bartholomew serves as the law school's vice dean for research and faculty development.

Professor Mark Bartholomew, vice dean for research and faculty development, is thinking, among other things, about the living dead.

Deceased celebrities, that is, and the legal issues that arise when “anyone can be reanimated and made to behave in a manner indistinguishable from their living presence.” At a time when newly available technology can produce a convincing version of long-deceased luminaries, reviving them to appear in new movies, sing new songs and market modern consumer goods, Bartholomew has proposed “A Right to Be Left Dead” commensurate with the Supreme Court’s finding of a “right to be left alone.”

His paper of that title, appearing in the California Law Review, suggests that narrowly construed protections for such a right would be good for society. But they need to be narrow—longstanding privacy and property protections give the dead fewer rights than the living, and this understanding should be part of any new safeguards against digital necromancy.

It’s the latest influential thinking from the law school’s resident specialist in the ways new technologies, including artificial intelligence, are reshaping intellectual property law. A frequent presence in the media and at leading conferences in the field, Bartholomew has been a prolific voice in this emerging area of law and policy.

For example, in his most recent book, Intellectual Property and the Brain (Cambridge University Press), Bartholomew suggests that the tools of neuroscience—such as MRI imaging and EEG readings—can bring new clarity to the terms of the legal tests that apply in IP disputes.

“Practitioners should be aware of what neuroscience is doing to alter longstanding beliefs about creativity, aesthetic appreciation and consumer capabilities—all questions at the heart of intellectual property law,” he says. “This knowledge can help them advocate for changes to assist their clients while simultaneously pushing the law toward a more accurate assessment of human behavior.”

And in an article recently published in the Trademark Reporter, Bartholomew and his co-authors presented “a new addition to the trademark litigator’s tool kit,” using neuroscientific techniques to measure how much consumers are confused by similar trademarks—the linchpin to a claim of trademark infringement.

Most recently, Bartholomew has written about the First Amendment implications of a Supreme Court decision involving pop artist Andy Warhol’s appropriation of a copyrighted photograph of the musical artist Prince. Both copyright law and publicity rights law immunize appropriations that are “transformative,” and the Warhol case defined that term more narrowly than in the past. His article argues that celebrity has a different role in public discourse than the works of art and music governed by copyright, leading to the conclusion that the transformativeness standard should be developed independently in the separate legal terrain of publicity rights.

Technology isn’t invariably good for the law. In a piece forthcoming in the Houston Law Review, Bartholomew raises a cautionary note about using neurological insights to understand consumer behavior. What’s needed, he says, is “a considered balance of trademark law’s descriptive aspects with its prescriptive ones”—and a healthy humility when faced with the complexities of the brain and human behavior.

“I’ve always been fascinated by psychology,” he says. “And psychology naturally connects with law. In general, my scholarship investigates how new technologies shake up existing legal assumptions and categories.”