In the heat of World War II, the state for the first time systematically contracted universities to advance science and technology to pursue the war effort.  During the Cold War, the institutional and legal arrangements that facilitated the state-science relationship broadened to cover a vast range of disciplines and agencies, from the far reaches of theoretical physics to the most applied technologies.  This course will explore the major, ongoing post-Cold War shift in this arrangement: corporations and foundations now play a powerful role in directing and supporting scientific inquiry.  The seminar asks: How are the relations among state, science, for-profit corporations, and civil society changing? How do contemporary politics interplay with research funding from all sources? What is the new geography of technical-scientific work? What kind of work, what forms of knowledge are stressed or dropped? Who is engaged in its pursuit and how is it disseminated? How do law and (de-)regulation affect the newly emergent model, and how are they affected by it?
 
Course Notes:
This course is jointly offered at Harvard Law School