States, the Final Frontier: How Minnesota’s State Constitution Can Serve as New Ammunition in the Fight Against Prison Gerrymandering
By Meredith Gingold. Full Text. “Prison gerrymandering” is the term for the United States Census Bureau’s practice of counting incarcerated individuals toward the population of the district where they are incarcerated, not the district where they resided before incarceration. Prison gerrymandering systematically transfers population and political power from urban districts to rural districts, as the…
Continue ReadingThe Influence of Alice: A Response to Jay P. Kesan & Runhua Wang’s Eligible Subject Matter at the Patent Office: An Empirical Study of the Influence of Alice on Patent Examiners and Patent Applicants
By Daryl Lim. Full Text. The Supreme Court’s decision in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank has had a decimating influence on patents and patent applications. Its long shadow looms over every stage of a patent’s life cycle—from prosecution to litigation and the administrative post-grant process at the patent office. In their article, Professor Jay Kesan…
Continue ReadingIn trust, data
By Keith Porcaro. Full Text. This Essay explores how the trust, and specifically the asset management functions that trust law affords, can be used to ameliorate select digital governance challenges. A trust’s ability to isolate assets can protect public interest technology projects against organizational failure, facilitate archiving and study of proprietary and deprecated software, and…
Continue ReadingCompleting the Quantum of Evidence: A Response to Daniel Capra and Liesa Richter’s Evidentiary Irony and the Incomplete Rule of Completeness
By Edward K. Cheng & Brooke Bowerman. Full Text. In Evidentiary Irony and the Incomplete Rule of Completeness, Daniel Capra and Liesa Richter propose an amendment to Federal Rule of Evidence 106, the “rule of completeness,” that formally recognizes the Rule’s trumping power over objections to hearsay. In this Response, we suggest a conceptual framework…
Continue ReadingAI Patents and the Self-Assembling Machine
By Dan L. Burk. Full Text. Legal scholarship has begun to consider the implications of algorithmic pattern recognition systems, colloquially dubbed “artificial intelligence” or “AI,” for intellectual property law. This emerging literature includes several analyses that breathlessly proclaim the imminent overthrow of intellectual property systems as we now know them. Indeed, some commentators have…
Continue ReadingReconciling Ideals: Restorative Justice as an Alternative to Sentencing Enhancements for Hate Crimes
By Olivia Levinson. Full Text. The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009 (“the Act”) was seen as a significant step forward in legal protections for LGBTQ+ people and racial minorities. It expanded the federal definition of hate crimes to include gender, disability, gender identity, and sexual orientation, and made…
Continue ReadingRethinking Contemporary Counter-Piracy Policy
By Hugh Fleming. Full Text. Traditional piracy often evokes the image of swashbuckling sailors, independent from the rest of society and roaming the seas to seek their fortune. The image has been heavily romanticized by Hollywood and other sources of popular folklore, much like the cowboys in the western United States. In reality, modern piracy…
Continue ReadingHow the COVID-19 Pandemic Has and Should Reshape the American Safety Net
By Andrew Hammond, Ariel Jurow Kleiman, and Gabriel Scheffler. Full Text. The COVID-19 pandemic has delivered an unprecedented shock to the United States and the world. It is unclear precisely how long this crisis, which is both epidemiological and economic, will last, and it is difficult to gauge the extent and direction of the changes…
Continue ReadingNavigating College Athlete Endorsements Around School Sponsorships
By Campbell Sode. Full Text. Colleges generally resist formal employment relationships with their athletes. But pending NCAA rules that will allow college athletes to solicit third-party endorsements are a game-changer. College athletic departments have lucrative partnerships with companies like Nike. These school sponsors derive significant intrinsic value from the fact that millions of fans will…
Continue ReadingLegal Writing’s Harmful Psyche
By Kevin Bennardo. Full Text. This essay argues that many in the legal writing discipline view themselves in a way that is harmful to the discipline’s success. First, the essay establishes that many legal writing professors view themselves as victims of oppression within the legal academy. Second, it relies on social psychology research to demonstrate…
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