By Kristin E. Hickman. Full Text.  In April 2018, the Treasury Department and the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) signed a Memorandum of Agreement reversing an exemption and providing for the first time that significant tax regulatory actions would be subject to OIRA review under Executive Order 12866. The transition to the Biden…

By Daniel P. Suitor. Full Text.  The continuing effects of slavery are still felt by millions of Black Americans today. A century-and-a-half after the formal end of their enslavement, Black people still suffer the deleterious effects of systemic racism in fundamental areas of their lives. The persistent disparities in health, economic, education, and carceral outcomes…

By Meredith Gingold. Full Text.  “Prison gerrymandering” is the term for the United States Census Bureau’s practice of counting incarcerated individuals toward the population of the district where they are incarcerated, not the district where they resided before incarceration. Prison gerrymandering systematically transfers population and political power from urban districts to rural districts, as the…

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…

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…

By Edward K. Cheng & Brooke Bowerman. Full Text. In Evidentiary Irony and the Incomplete Rule of Completeness, Daniel Capra and Liesa Richter propose an amendment to Federal Rule of Evidence 106, the “rule of completeness,” that formally recognizes the Rule’s trumping power over objections to hearsay.  In this Response, we suggest a conceptual framework…

By Dan L. Burk. Full Text.   Legal scholarship has begun to consider the implications of algorithmic pattern recognition systems, colloquially dubbed “artificial intelligence” or “AI,” for intellectual property law. This emerging literature includes several analyses that breathlessly proclaim the imminent overthrow of intellectual property systems as we now know them.  Indeed, some commentators have…