By Alec Foote Mitchell. Full Text.  The London Inter-Bank Offered Rate, or LIBOR, is known as “the world’s most important number.” Referenced in almost $350 trillion of financial contracts, LIBOR is central to modern finance. But in 2023, it is vanishing. As central banks, governments, financial institutions, and private parties rush to find replacement rates,…

By Jenna Hensel. Full Text.  Social media companies enjoy a broad scope of protection from liability due to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act offers social media companies two prominent protections: (1) protection from liability for user content posted on their websites because social media companies “cannot…

By Zach Wright. Full Text.  The Natural Gas Act (NGA) governs the siting of interstate natural gas pipelines. There is not a federal body that sites pipelines—instead, the NGA delegates federal eminent domain to private actors to site pipelines through a certificate of need. Private actors have condemned private and state land to site pipelines…

By Lexi Pitz. Full Text.  Assisted living facilities are wildly popular among elderly Americans. This trend is expected to persist due to increasing life expectancy, an aging baby boomer population, and the growing preference for assisted living facilities over nursing homes. Despite their growing popularity, the assisted living industry remains alarmingly underregulated at both the…

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…