BOOK: "Working Knowledge: Employee Innovation and the Rise of Corporate Intellectual Property, 1800-1930", by Catherine L. Fisk

Working Knowledge: Employee Innovation and the Rise of Corporate Intellectual Property, 1800-1930, by Catherine L. Fisk, University of California Irvine Law

University of North Carolina Press

All information here

The book, which appeared in "Studies in Legal History" (the American Society for Legal History’s book series), won both the Littleton-Griswold Prize of the American Historical Association and the ASLH’s John Phillip Reid Book Award in 2010: Skilled workers of the early nineteenth century enjoyed a degree of professional independence because workplace knowledge and technical skill were their "property," or at least their attribute. In most sectors of today's economy, however, it is a foundational and widely accepted truth that businesses retain legal ownership of employee-generated intellectual property.

In Working Knowledge, Catherine Fisk chronicles the legal and social transformations that led to the transfer of ownership of employee innovation from labor to management. This deeply contested development was won at the expense of workers' entrepreneurial independence and ultimately, Fisk argues, economic democracy.

By reviewing judicial decisions and legal scholarship on all aspects of employee-generated intellectual property and combing the archives of major nineteenth-century intellectual property-producing companies--including DuPont, Rand McNally, and the American Tobacco Company--Fisk makes a highly technical area of law accessible to general readers while also addressing scholarly deficiencies in the histories of labor, intellectual property, and the business of technology.

BOOK: "Cohabitation and Non-Marital Births in England and Wales" (1600-2012), edited by Rebecca Probert (June 2014)

Cohabitation and Non-Marital Births in England and Wales (1600-2012), edited by Rebecca Probert, (University of Warwick) 

June 2014

All information here 

From the press:

Today, almost half of all children are born outside marriage, with cohabiting relationships accounting for the majority of such births. But what was the situation in earlier centuries? Bringing together leading historians, demographers and lawyers, this interdisciplinary collection examines the changing context of non-marital child-bearing in England and Wales since 1600. Drawing on Private Acts of Parliament, ecclesiastical court records, reported cases, sessions files, coronial records, poor law records, petitions to the London Foundling Hospital, the registers of the London Bridewell, the records of charitable institutions, surveys and modern demographic data, it not only shows the relative rarity of cohabitation in earlier periods but also discovers the nature of individual relationships. It also explores how differences in the extent of both non-marital child-bearing and cohabitation emerge depending on definition, source material, interpretation and location, building up a more nuanced picture of past practices.