The 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 ReadingSuing the Aiders and Abettors of Torture: Reviving the Torture Victim Protection Act
By Ryan Plasencia. Full Text. While universally condemned by the international community, state-sponsored torture and extrajudicial killing are still pervasive practices around the globe. This Note examines a specific form of state-sponsored torture and killing—those acts that are facilitated or aided by multinational corporations with profit motives. In 1992, the United States enacted the Torture…
Continue ReadingEmbedded Deception: How the FTC’s Recent Interpretation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act Missed the Mark
By Olivia Levinson. Full Text. Every year, YouTube amasses billions of dollars in online advertising revenue. While many advertisements play before, in between, and after YouTube videos, there are often more elusive advertisements within the videos themselves. Embedded advertisements within videos pose unique consumer protection concerns, especially as they pertain to young audiences. Ryan’s World,…
Continue ReadingUtility-Expanding Fair Use
By Jacob Victor. Full Text. Copyright’s fair use doctrine is increasingly applied to large-scale uses of creative works by new digital technologies, such as the Google Books Project. Such technologies—which the Second Circuit has recently come to call “utility-expanding”—allow the public to more productively use or efficiently access books, articles, music, films, and other copyrighted…
Continue ReadingOn Sacred Land
By Khaled A. Beydoun. Full Text. From 2010 through the present, land-use discrimination against Muslims marked a prolific uptick—sixty percent greater than that of the post-9/11 period. Most startlingly, only twenty percent of Muslim land use disputes were resolved without a federal suit, compared to eighty-four percent of suits involving a non-Muslim claimant. This highlights…
Continue ReadingCatalyzing Privacy Law
By Anupam Chander, Margot E. Kaminski, and William McGeveran. Full Text. The United States famously lacks a comprehensive federal data privacy law. In the past year, however, over half the states have considered broad privacy bills or have established task forces to propose possible privacy legislation. Meanwhile, congressional committees are holding hearings on multiple privacy…
Continue ReadingLaw Enforcement’s Lochner
By Miriam H. Baer. Full Text. Long-established rules of constitutional criminal procedure empower the government to cheaply and efficiently demand information from businesses and corporations, even when those entities are themselves criminal and regulatory targets. These rules have become extremely valuable to government investigators, notwithstanding their contestable premises and wide-ranging effects on the people who…
Continue ReadingStanding Up to the Treasury: Applying the Procedural Standing Analysis to Post-Mayo, Pre-Enforcement APA Treasury Challenges
By Casey N. Epstein. Full Text. Administrative law and tax law have clashed for the past several decades. While recent caselaw, starting with Mayo Foundation in 2010, has indicated that administrative law, such as the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), does apply to the Treasury, many questions remain unanswered. Much attention has recently focused on the…
Continue ReadingDistributional Arguments, in Reverse
By Alex Raskolnikov. Full Text. What should the government do about the distribution of resources and outcomes in society? Two arguments have shaped academic debates about this question for several decades. The first argument states that economic regulation should focus on efficiency alone, leaving distributional considerations for the tax-and-transfer system. The second argument objects to…
Continue Reading