Skip to main content

Catherine Fisk Wins ASLH Book Award for Working Knowledge

Catherine Fisk of the University of California, Irvine, School of Law has been awarded the John Phillip Reid Book Award of the American Society for Legal History for Working Knowledge: Employee Innovation and the Rise of Corporate Intellectual Property, 1800-1930 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009). The award is for the best monograph beyond an author’s first book published in English in Anglo-American legal history, broadly defined. The ASLH citation read in part:
Catherine Fisk’s Working Knowledge is a book of many different virtues. It takes on a novel question—when, how, and why did corporations come pervasively to own and control the intellectual property created by their employees?—and it brings to bear prodigious primary research, not just in case law but in corporate archives as well. By combining these two types of sources, among others, Fisk delivers a compelling story of doctrinal development—especially in the areas of patent, copyright, and trade secrets—but also grounds that story in a textured history of the internal practices and cultures of DuPont, Eastman Kodak, and other companies known for innovation in the early 20th century. Moreover, Fisk brings together a range of literatures that do not always make contact with each other: the literatures of legal history, of business history, of labor history, and of cultural history, among others. Adroitly deploying all of this research, she delivers a highly readable narrative that exposes the mutability of historical perspectives on identity and creativity. She offers us both a big, satisfying narrative arc and a collection of smaller arguments and speculations.
Working Knowledge was also awarded the 2010 Littleton-Griswold Prize in American Law and Society of the American Historical Association.


Tip of the hat to the Legal History Blog.

Popular posts from this blog

The Exchange has moved to the BHC's website

  Dear members subscribers of The Exchange   The Exchange, the weblog of the BHC, is now part of our website ( https://thebhc.org ). We migrated the blog to serve our membership and interested parties best since Blogger is discontinuing its email service.   Note that this will be the last message we will send from Blogger .   The Exchange was founded by Pat Denault over a decade ago, and it has become an essential channel for announcements from and about the BHC and from our subscribers and members. Announcements from The Exchange will come up on the News section of our website as they did before. However, if you wish to receive these announcements via email, and you have not done so yet, please subscribe to The Exchange by: Going to our website's homepage ( https://thebhc.org ), s crolling down to the end of the page, and clicking on "Subscribe to the Latest BHC News." Or go to the “News” section of our website's homepage ( https://thebhc.org/ ),   and click on “The

Regina Blaszczyk on the Business of Color

In September, MIT Press published Regina Lee Blaszczyk 's book, The Color Revolution , in which she "traces the relationship of color and commerce, from haute couture to automobile showrooms to interior design, describing the often unrecognized role of the color profession in consumer culture." Readers can see some of the 121 color illustrations featured in the book at the MIT PressLog here and here . The author has recently written an essay on her research for the book in the Hagley Archives for the Hagley Library and Archives newsletter.    Reviews can be found in the New York Times , The Atlantic , Leonardo , and Imprint ; one can listen to an audio interview with Reggie Blaszczyk, and read her posts, "How Auto Shows Sparked a Color Revolution" on the Echoes blog and "True Blue: DuPont and the Color Revolution" on the Chemical Heritage Foundation website . Also available is a CHF video of the author discussing another excerpt from her rese

The Exchange is changing platforms! Please read to continue receiving our messages [working links]

  Dear subscribers to The Exchange: I am happy to announce that our blog is moving platforms. For almost a decade, the Business History Conference has used Blogger to publish and archive posts. However, in early 2021, the blogging site announced that their email serving service would be terminated. In addition, we noticed that many of our subscribers had stopped receiving the blog’s emails, and our subscription provides very limited reporting. In agreement, the Electronic Media Oversight Committee , web administrator Shane Hamilton, and web editor Paula de la Cruz-Fernández decided to move our web blog from Blogger to our website . We now write to you to request that if you wish to continue receiving announcements from the BHC, please subscribe here: https://thebhc.org/subscribe-exchange   Interested people will be asked to log into their BHC’s account or open one, free. If you have questions, please email The Business History Conference <web-admin [at] thebhc.org>  Through The