Objectivist Summer Conference 2010

The 2010 Objectivist Summer Conference schedule and details are here!  I'm super excited because we are actually going this year.  That's a certainty, because my husband, Adam Mossoff, is giving a general lecture - Intellectual Property Rights: Securing the Values of the Mind.  Here is the session description from the OCON web site:

The extraordinary achievements in the modern pharmaceutical, biotech, telecommunications and computer industries are dramatic evidence of the significance of intellectual property rights to man’s life. Yet patents, copyrights and other intellectual property rights are under attack—theoretically, morally and legally.

This lecture explains why intellectual property rights are fundamentally important property rights by grounding them in the values that man must conceive and produce in order to live and flourish.

Fundamentally, all property is at root intellectual property, which is why Ayn Rand believes that intellectual property rights represent “the legal implementation of the base of all property rights: a man’s right to the product of his own mind.” In explaining why this is the case, this lecture identifies the radical political and legal implications of Rand’s innovative ethical theory, such as her novel concept of value and her discovery of the role of man’s mind in sustaining his life.

Adam's presentation at the conference will be geared toward Objectivists, but this lecture is not some side-line of his intellectual work as a law professor.  This is his intellectual work!  And if you are thinking about how lucky he is to be able to do this for a living, shame on you.  Luck had nothing to do with it.  Adam created this career for himself through a relentless, passionate, independent, selfish quest.  There was no road-map for him, and being an Objectivist made everything more challenging.  And just last month, the faculty at George Mason University School of Law voted in favor of tenure for him.  There are a few, mostly bureaucratic, hurdles left, but we can pretty safely say that Adam has earned tenure!

I've learned so much from the way Adam has managed his career goals, and if you can't tell, I admire him greatly for it.  I actually think that he could give a conference lecture on the subject of pursuing a career in academia, but in the meantime, he's promised to guest blog about it here sometime in the near future.

Anyway, I hope to see and/or meet many of my readers at the conference.  With Leonard Peikoff giving another series of lectures on his DIM Hypothesis, Adam's lecture, and what looks to be a really nice venue, it should be quite an event!