Eligible Subject Matter at the Patent Office: An Empirical Study of the Influence of Alice on Patent Examiners and Patent Applicants
By Jay P. Kesan and Runhua Wang. Full Text. The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision regarding patent-eligible subject matter in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank has been in effect for more than five years, and it has made a significant impact on inventions involving software, information technology, and the life sciences. There is significant scholarly debate…
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 ReadingBehind the Binary Bars: A Critique of Prison Placement Policies for Transgender, Non-Binary, and Gender Non-Conforming Prisoners
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…
Continue ReadingMinnesota’s Digital Divide: How Minnesota Can Replicate the Rural Electrification Act to Deliver Rural Broadband
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…
Continue ReadingThe Advent of Effortless Expression: An Examination of the Copyrightability of BCI-Encoded Brain Signals
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…
Continue ReadingTransactional Scripts in Contract Stacks
By Shaanan Cohney and David A. Hoffman. Full Text. In conventional transactions, written contracts usually memorialize the terms of the commercial exchange. For deals in which some of the goods being transferred and the forum for the trade are digitized—as in the case of cryptocurrencies—parties may use computer code rather than a written contract to…
Continue ReadingCore Criminal Procedure
By Steven Arrigg Koh. Full Text. Constitutional criminal procedural rights are familiar to contemporary criminal law scholars and practitioners alike. But today, U.S. criminal justice may diverge substantially from its centuries-old framework when all three branches recognize only a core set of inviolable rights, implicitly or explicitly discarding others. This criminal procedural line drawing takes…
Continue ReadingParental Autonomy over Prenatal End-of-Life Decisions
By Greer Donley. Full Text. When parents learn that their potential child has a life-limiting, often devastating, prenatal diagnosis, they are faced with the first (and perhaps, only) healthcare decisions they will make for their child. Many choose to terminate the pregnancy because they believe it is in their potential child’s best interest to avoid…
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