By Ryan Fitzgerald. Full Text.  In 2011, through the America Invents Act, Congress created a new administrative procedure, inter partes review (IPR), to allow third parties to challenge issued patents before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). It did so in recognition “that questionable patents [were] too easily obtained and [were] too difficult to…

By Jessica Szuminski. Full Text.  To help us more easily understand the world, society relies on binary concepts to create a sense of order: left or right, up or down, this or that. But when relying on binary concepts, the other available options often are neglected: not left or right, but forward; not up or…

By Abby Oakland. Full Text. For disadvantaged communities, education can be the silver bullet. It can equip and empower students to rise above their economic station. It can level the playing field. It can provide opportunity absent in their current circumstances. It can open doors that would otherwise remain closed. Recognizing this power, Minnesota’s Constitution…

By Jonathan Baker. Full Text. This Note anticipates the development and deployment of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) and attempts to reconcile this technology’s implications with modern U.S. copyright doctrine. Although researchers and practitioners have primarily used BCIs to restore motor function to and improve the quality of life for people severely disabled by neuromuscular impairments, the…

By Jackie Fielding. Full Text Despite the media attention afforded to the recent family separation crisis at the southern border of the United States, there is a much more prevalent and common form of family separation: parental incarceration. The United States is the largest incarcerator worldwide, and the surge in the incarceration of women has…

By Sam Cleveland. Full Text. Employers are increasingly using mandatory pre-dispute arbitration clauses in employment contracts. Doing so gives employers benefits, such as privacy, the ability to select the arbitrators, and repeat players benefits, but they often leave employees without meaningful recourse when they are wronged, especially when class action waivers are used. This effect…

By Jack Davis. Full Text. After the horror of slavery, African Americans faced another obstacle to equality. Their lack of property created an intergenerational wealth problem that persists today. A Congressional act of reparations designed with housing in mind could strengthen our nation’s moral fabric while supporting economic activity for beneficiaries both in the present…

By Bonny Birkeland. Full Text. This Note explores the implications of the use of force in outer space under the current space and jus in bello regimes. By looking at the use of kinetic and direct energy ASATs under a proportionality calculus, this Note proposes a new consideration framework which outlines what a State actor…

By Lucas Curtis. Full Text. Rarely invoked in almost two hundred years, the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) emerged as the main vehicle for bringing internationally-recognized human rights claims into United States courts in the 1980s and the 1990s. However, the turn of the twenty-first century has brought a series of Supreme Court decisions that have…

By Michael Arin. Full Text. This Note examines the growing concern over publisher-controlled leagues in the esports industry. Upon recognizing the value of organized, competitive playing of video games—esports—beyond mere marketing for the underlying game, publishers began to create leagues of teams to play each other. These league operators used traditional sports as a model.…