Kauffman Summer Legal Institute
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Kauffman Summer Legal Institute blazes a new trail again this year.
For the past four years, the Kauffman Foundation has invited leading scholars and researchers to the Kauffman Summer Legal Institute to discuss cutting-edge research on topics related to "law, innovation, and growth." The conferences strived to consider ways to improve the legal landscape so that it is more conducive to innovation and economy-wide growth and to develop a research agenda to advance the understanding of law and policies on this important topic.
Last year's conference produced a thoughtful reform on policies to promote health care innovation, to be released in April this year. The previous year the conference generated the widely publicized—and we believe path-breaking—Rules for Growth, available for download from the Kauffman website. Rules for Growth provided the intellectual ammunition for the “Startup Act”, which the Foundation outlined on its website in July 2011, and which has served as the model for a number of legislative models now being considered in Congress.
Our central purpose for the July 2012 conference will be not only to debate and discuss these issues –which the commissioned papers in the attached outline will address in various fashions –but to produce an outline of a white paper that the Foundation will produce (and hopefully you will comfortable being associated with), for distribution and wide dissemination in the fall of 2012 or early 2013. A volume of the edited papers will be published separately.