First Person: When Scholars Call In the Lawyers

This past spring, I was a participant at a fascinating scholarly conference on intellectual property and the Dead Sea Scrolls. The conference, hosted by the University of Edinburgh, was marred, however, by a threatening letter addressed to organizers by lawyers for Elisha Qimron, professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Israel. Qimron was rightly peeved that he was not invited to give a paper at the conference. One wonders, though, whether the slight was really so grievous that Qimron had to bring his high-powered Israeli lawyers into it. Readers may recall that in 1991 Qimron sued BAR (or, […]