On November 9, 2012 LAMB is hosting an event in Room 1130 at 12:30 p.m., organized by Professor McKenna, to discuss a new book by Brett Frischmann, Professor of Law at Cardozo School of Law, on Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources. The book devotes much needed attention to understanding how society benefits from infrastructure resources and how management decisions affect a wide variety of interests. The book links infrastructure, a particular set of resources defined in terms of the manner in which they create value, with commons, a resource management principle by which a resource is shared within a community. The infrastructure commons ideas have broad implications for scholarship and public policy across many fields ranging from traditional infrastructure like roads to environmental economics to intellectual property to Internet policy.
Stanford Law Professor Mark Lemley described Frischmann’s book as “timely and important. What he is attempting here is nothing less than a reimagining of how economics thinks about infrastructure. His argument ranges from intellectual property to telecommunications to the case for government investment in roads and bridges." And according to the late Elinor Ostrom, Nobel Prize winner in Economics, “faculty and students across the social sciences and engineering will all find Brett Frischmann’s new book to provide essential guidance for the analysis of diverse types of infrastructure resources and how policies affect the effectiveness, efficiency, fairness, and sustainability of outcomes. Rarely can one find such a broad and useful foundation for digging in and understanding the complexities of modern infrastructures. An extraordinary book.”More information on the book can be found at http://www.brettfrischmann.com/Infrastructure_Book.