Professor Buccafusco joined the Chicago-Kent faculty in 2009 and was voted Professor of the Year by the Student Bar Association for 2009-10. He teaches torts and copyright law. His research interests include intellectual property law, behavioral law and economics, law and psychology, and legal history. His recent work focuses on psychological challenges to legal notions of rationality and on the application of happiness research to the law. His published articles have appeared in the Columbia Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review (twice), California Law Review, Cornell Law Review, and Georgetown Law Journal. Professor Buccafusco is a Ph.D. candidate in legal history at the University of Chicago. He graduated from the University of Georgia School of Law in 2004 and earned a B.S. degree from Georgia Tech in 2001. Before coming to Chicago-Kent, Professor Buccafusco taught for a year as a visiting faculty member at the University of Illinois College of Law.
Law & Psychology
Well-Being Analysis vs. Cost-Benefit Analysis (with J. Bronsteen & J. Masur) (symposium) (forthcoming), Duke Law Journal (2012)
Cost-benefit analysis is the primary tool used by policymakers to inform administrative decisionmaking. Yet its...
Retribution and the Experience of Punishment (with J. Bronsteen and J. Masur), California Law Review (2010)
In a prior article, we argued that punishment theorists need to take into account the...
Valuing Intellectual Property: An Experiment (with C. Sprigman), Cornell Law Review (2010)
In this article we report on the results of an experiment we performed to determine...
Welfare as Happiness (with J. Bronsteen & J. Masur), Georgetown Law Journal (2010)
Perhaps the most important goal of law and policy is improving people’s lives. But what...
Happiness and Punishment (with J. Bronsteen & J. Masur), University of Chicago Law Review (2009)
This article continues our project to apply groundbreaking new literature on the behavioral psychology of...
Evidence
Review of David H. Kaye, The Double Helix and the Law of Evidence, 29 Law and History Review 642 (2011)
Gaining/Losing Perspective on the Law, or Keeping Visual Evidence in Perspective, Popular Culture and Law (2006)
Gaining/Losing Perspective on the Law, or Keeping Visual Evidence in Perspective, University of Miami Law Review (2004)
Intellectual Property
Do Bad Things Happen When Works Enter the Public Domain?: Empirical Tests of Copyright Term Extension (with P. Heald) (forthcoming), Berkeley Technology Law Journal (2012)
The international debate over copyright term extension for existing works turns on the validity of...
Making Sense of Intellectual Property Law, Cornell Law Review (2012)
Intellectual property (IP) scholars have long struggled to explain the boundaries of and differences between...
Valuing Attribution and Publication in Intellectual Property (with C. Sprigman and Z. Burns) (2012)
This is the third in a series of articles focusing on the experimental economics of...
On the Legal Consequences of Sauces: Should Thomas Keller's Recipes Be Per Se Copyrightable?, Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal (2007)
The restaurant industry now takes in over $500 billion a year, but recent courts have...