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Volume 109 - Issue 6

Beyond the Article I Horizon: Congress's Enumerated Powers and Universal Jurisdiction Over Drug Crimes

By Eugene Kontorovich. Full text here. The United States routinely apprehends foreign drug traffickers in international waters. It prosecutes many of them under the Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act, which allows for jurisdiction even over foreign-flagged vessels with no demonstrable intent of bringing their cargo to the United States. This assertion of universal jurisdiction—a doctrine generally…

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Exchange: The Behavioral Economics of Consumer Contracts

By Oren Bar-Gill. Full text here. In the past decade, behavioral economics has established itself as a contender to the throne of neoclassical economics in the economic analysis of law. The pros and cons of behavioral as compared to neoclassical economics have been vigorously debated at the general, methodology level. But the success or failure of…

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Are Patents on Interfaces Impeding Interoperability?

By Pamela Samuelson. Full text here. Commentators and policymakers have frequently expressed serious concerns about the exclusionary potency of patents on communications protocols and interface designs for information and communications technologies (ICT). Among the proposed policy responses to potential harms arising from the exercise of such interface patents are excluding interfaces from patent protection, immunizing use…

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The Anticompetitive Effects of Underenforced Invalid Patents

By Christopher R. Leslie. Full text here. Courts and scholars have long debated the proper balance between antitrust law and intellectual property rights. Proponents of strong intellectual property rights and those of vigilant antitrust enforcement often find themselves at opposite ends of the debate. Some scholars and intellectual property owners resist the encroachment of antitrust law…

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Adaptive Federalism: The Case Against Reallocating Environmental Regulatory Authority

By David E. Adelman & Kirsten H. Engel. Full text here. A hallmark of environmental federalism is that neither federal nor state governments limit themselves to what many legal scholars have deemed to be their appropriate domains. The federal government regulates local issues, such as remediation of contaminated industrial sites, while state and local governments develop…

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Note: Capturing the Ghost: Expanding Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11 to Solve Procedural Concerns with Ghostwriting

By Jeffrey P. Justman. Full text here. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure have not kept pace with the ways in which some lawyers are representing low-income litigants. For example, in its current form, Rule 11 only recognizes traditional “full scope” representation and purely pro se representation, without addressing the ever-increasing possibility that lawyers may represent…

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Note: Between the Possible and the Probable: Defining the Plausibility Standard After Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly and Ashcroft v. Iqbal

By Nicholas Tymoczko. Full text here. After fifty years of clarity and continuity, pleading standards are now the subject of confusion and debate. In 2007, the Supreme Court, in Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, replaced Conley v. Gibson’s “no set of facts” standard with the plausibility standard, under which a complaint must contain enough factual allegations…

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