Margaret Chon

Retention of knowledge and self-care skills after an intensive in-patient diabetes education program

Diabetes knowledge and self-care skills were studied in 35 adults with IDDM and NIDDM before and after an intensive in-patient education program and 6-12 months after discharge. Knowledge and skills were compared to fasting serum glucose levels and percent ideal body weight (%IBW). Although knowledge improved during hospitalization and knowledge and skills were maintained at follow-up, there was not a significant relationship between fasting serum glucose levels and knowledge or self-care skills or %IBW.

Global Intellectual Property Governance (Under Construction)

Top down as well as bottom-up models of regulation are shifting to a governance paradigm characterized by the greater interaction among public, private and civil society sectors, as well as potential increased flexibility of law. As applied to intellectual property, particularly in the international context, governance literature is emerging but still episodic. In this Article, I examine the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Development Agenda, currently being implemented through its Committee on Development and Intellectual Property. WIPO’s efforts to address global development goals with intellectual property can be theorized through the more participatory and dynamic legal mechanisms promised by global governance. Among the challenges are fragmentation, policy incoherence and a relative lack of due process of softer law, as enacted and as enforced. The pragmatic impact of this major WIPO initiative — evaluated both in terms of the projected benefits and risks of global governance — remains to be seen.

Leveraging Certification Marks for Public Health

This chapter in a forthcoming book on the New Intellectual Property of Health explores how certification marks might impact public health via consumer choice rather than by government mandate. Labeling and marking devices such as certification marks could provide greater information to consumers about health-related individual choices, but their full public health impact will be affected by the same factors that throw into question the effectiveness of other forms of disclosure, such as mandatory disclosure of nutrition labeling. These behavioral factors include consumer understanding of the information as well as consumer purchasing responses to this information. Another significant factor affecting their ultimate impact is the capacity of institutions to create and educate consumers about these marks as well as to maintain their informational integrity in the context of powerful countervailing market forces. Reliance upon market forces to promote better public health outcomes does not obviate the role of the state, which plays a crucial role in guarding and shaping core public interest goals, not only to encourage creative solutions to challenging public health problems, but also to constrain regulatory capture by private, market-based stakeholders.

PPPs in Global IP (Public-Private Partnerships in Global Intellectual Property)

Under what conditions may public-private partnerships (PPPs or P3s) involved in multilateral development policy advance public interest goals in global intellectual property? This chapter begins to assess how non-profit partners within certain development policy PPPs generate and/or implement norms, thereby impacting public policies that promote both innovations as well as access to those innovations. It brings pertinent literature in the area of global administrative law to bear on these emerging but already embedded institutions of private policy-making. As hybrid actors operating across polyglot transnational networks, the practices of these PPPs illuminate and deepen both global governance and intellectual property scholarship. Among other things, they reveal PPPs as significant but not frictionless regime-straddlers linking the legal domains of trade, intellectual property and development.