Recent developments in trade mark law have called into question a variety of basic features, as well as bolder extensions, of legal protection. Other disciplines can help us think about fundamental issues such as: What is a trade mark? What does it do? What should be the scope of its protection? The present volume assembles essays examining trade marks and brands from a multiplicity of fields. We believe the broad range of the contributions to this volume makes it unique. There are already works on trade mark law, works on branding and marketing, works on linguistics and marketing, and works on sociological aspects of commercial identity, but no attempt to bring these approaches together. Equally importantly, rather than offering a litany of discrete chapters each independently covering a different discipline, each part of this book pairs lawyers’ and non-lawyers’ perspectives, so that each commentator will address and critique his or her counterpart's analysis. Authors of the main papers and of the commentaries divide roughly evenly between lawyers and specialists from other disciplines.

The perspectives of non-legal fields are intended to enrich legal academics’ and practitioners’ reflections about trade marks, as well as to expose lawyers, judges and policy-makers to ideas, concepts and methods that could prove to be of particular importance in the development of positive law. For those who wish to explore further, an extensive bibliography collecting commentaries from all the fields here represented concludes the volume.