Traditionally, the United States patent system has been considered successful in promoting innovation in the pharmaceutical industry. In the past few years, however, loss of patent protection has caused sales revenue for innovative firms to plummet. Many firms have heavily cut their investments in research and development (R&D) for new… Read More »
Pursuant to federal statutes and to laws in all fifty states, the United States government has assembled the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), a database containing DNA profiles of over eleven million citizens. Without judicial authorization, the government searches these profiles one hundred thousand times every day, seeking to link… Read More »
The annihilation of more than 1.5 million Cambodians at the hands of the Khmer Rouge is widely considered a quintessential case of genocide. Whether these atrocities meet the definition of genocide as a legal matter, however, remains unsettled. As of October 2012, the question of whether genocide occurred in Cambodia… Read More »
As generations of law students have learned, Lucy v. Zehmer is a tale of two “doggoned drunks” drinking liquor and bantering over the sale of a farm the weekend before Christmas in 1952. Adrian Hardy Zehmer, allegedly drunk and joking, scribbled a contract for the sale of his farm on… Read More »
Recent high-profile prosecutions under the Stolen Valor Act of 2005 (the Act) have raised important questions about the First Amendment’s protection of false speech. The Act makes it a crime for an individual to “falsely represent[] himself or herself, verbally or in writing, to have been awarded any decoration or… Read More »
Marin K. Levy
- Duke University School of Law
Twenty-five years ago, then-Chief Judge Wilfred Feinberg of the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit wrote, “[T]he way that courts operate has a significant, possibly even dominant, influence on the quality of justice that can be obtained from them.” Yet despite the apparent importance of how courts manage their workload—for… Read More »
In her first term as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Elena Kagan recused herself from roughly one-third of the cases on the Court’s docket. Although Justices do not typically divulge their grounds for recusing, the reason for all of these recusals was obvious: Kagan… Read More »
Intellectual property (IP) law in the United States is off course and headed onto the shoals of ever-increasing protectionism. Copyright law, in particular, has come uncoupled from its constitutionally defined purpose. A tightly circumscribed right intended to incentivize creativity and the spread of knowledge has instead become an ever-expanding monopoly… Read More »
Lee Anne Fennell
- University of Chicago Law School
Lee Anne Fennell
When individuals and households select products, services, or endeavors, they are usually making a bundled choice that comes with a certain level of risk exposure or insurance protection built in. Buying a house? You’re also buying a hefty dose of local housing market risk, for better or… Read More »
David J. R. Frakt
Dwayne O. Andreas School of Law, Barry University
During the last presidential campaign, then-candidate Barack Obama pledged to close the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba and suggested that he would end the use of military commissions and rely exclusively on federal courts to prosecute suspected terrorists. Upon assuming office, he revised his approach and announced a bifurcated… Read More »