Symposium: Creativity and the Law: Introduction

Creativity is on the American mind. President Obama routinely suggests that creativity and ingenuity are the keys to America\u27s economic future. Bill Gates emphasizes the power of creativity to solve the world\u27s most pressing, and most difficult, problems. 2 But the creativity story is, of late, usually bleakly told: indeed, a recent Newsweek cover story proclaimed a Creativity Crisis. Last November, a group of twelve academics gathered at the Notre Dame Law School to consider law\u27s role in this story. What is creativity, and how does it map onto legal concepts like originality, novelty, or non-obviousness? What should law, and particularly intellectual property (IP) law, do to promote creativity? What can it do? Whose creativity does the law currently favor? These are big, interdisciplinary questions, and for that reason the symposium brought together experts from several fields: psychologists, an economist, and law professors with backgrounds in a variety of other disciplines, including anthropology, chemistry, comparative literature, and history of science. Each of the contributions in this volume can stand alone as an important contribution to the literature, but collectively they represent perhaps the strongest collection of essays on creativity and the law that has been assembled in one place