UCLA School of Law

Like secular common law and civil law, Jewish law generally favors free marketplace competition. Yet, both secular law and Jewish law prohibit competition that they deem wrongful. This chapter for a book anthology about intellectual property and religion fleshes out key principles of wrongful competition and their application to prohibitions on slavish imitation of product design and misappropriation of trade secrets in both Jewish law and secular law. In so doing, the chapter highlights rabbinic court rulings in two recent disputes – one involving competing kosher pizza restaurants and the other involving competing stores that sold kosher chocolates. Those rabbinic rulings applying Jewish law highlight intriguing parallels with prohibitions against wrongful competition, including by way of a new entrant’s slavish imitation of an incumbent’s product design and misappropriation of an incumbent’s trade secrets. Jewish law likely encompasses prohibitions on slavish imitation and misappropriation of trade secrets. But it does so in the context of providing incumbents with far broader protection against potentially ruinous competition from a new market entrant than secular law doctrines would accord.