Law Commons^™

Ks Pop Celebrating Three Years Of Tech-Driven Justice For All, Ayyoub Ajmi

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This article explores the development and impact of the Kansas Protection Order Portal (KS POP), highlighting the vital role of law librarians in the portal's design and implementation. The article showcases how KS POP has streamlined the legal process for domestic violence, sexual assault, and human trafficking victims in Kansas, marking a significant advancement in accessible legal support and serving as a model for future innovations in the justice system.

Revolutionizing Access To Justice: The Role Of Ai-Powered Chatbots And Retrieval-Augmented Generation In Legal Self-Help, Ayyoub Ajmi

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Advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) present numerous opportunities to routinize and make the law more accessible to self-represented litigants, notably through AI chatbots employing natural language processing for conversational interactions. These chatbots exhibit legal reasoning abilities without explicit training on legal-specific datasets. However, they face challenges processing less common and more specific knowledge from their training data. Additionally, once trained, their static status makes them susceptible to knowledge obsolescence over time. This article explores the application of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to enhance chatbot accuracy, drawing insights from a real-world implementation developed for a court system to support self-help litigants.

Introduction: The Arc Of Race In Professional And Collegiate Sports Symposium, Kenneth D. Ferguson

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This introduction will highlight the five articles featured in the symposium issue of the UMKC Law Review and will also situate those articles in the Sports Law Symposium titled, The Arc of Race in Professional and Collegiate Sports. The goal of the two-day virtual symposium was to bring together leading legal, social science, and medical science scholars to engage in discourse concerning how race and gender have affected and continue to influence decision making in professional and collegiate sports. The symposium exposed how race, culture, ethnicity, and gender affect a wide range of phenomena in scientific fields such as neuropsychological …

Is The Chemical Genus Claim Really “Dead” At The Federal Circuit?: Part Ii, Christopher M. Holman

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A 2020 law review article entitled The Death of the Genus Claim (“Death”) purports to document a dramatic shift in the Federal Circuit’s interpretation of 35 U.S.C. 112(a)’s enablement and written description requirements, particularly as applied to chemical genus claims. According to the authors of Death, it has become nearly impossible to obtain a chemical genus claim that will be upheld as valid in the face of a challenge for overbreadth under Section 112(a). Death was cited extensively in Amgens’s successful petition for certiorari in Amgen v. Sanofi, a case asking the Supreme Court to overturn the Federal Circuit’s decision …

Is The Chemical Genus Claim Really “Dead” At The Federal Circuit?: Part I, Christopher M. Holman

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A 2020 law review article entitled The Death of the Genus Claim (“Death”) purports to document a dramatic shift in the Federal Circuit’s interpretation of 35 U.S.C. 112(a)’s enablement and written description requirements, particularly as applied to chemical genus claims. According to the authors of Death, it has become nearly impossible to obtain a chemical genus claim that will be upheld as valid in the face of a challenge for overbreadth under Section 112(a). Death was cited extensively in Amgens’s successful petition for certiorari in Amgen v. Sanofi, a case asking the Supreme Court to overturn the Federal Circuit’s decision …

Covid-19: A Catalyst To Automate Protection Order Petitions To Support Self-Represented Litigants, Ayyoub Ajmi

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COVID-19 exacerbated the crisis in access to legal services especially for victims of domestic violence for whom the pandemic made their situations even more precarious. In this article, the author shares his experience of building and implementing an automated solution to help pro-se litigants petition the court for emergency protection orders remotely and without the need to visit the courthouse. The article describes the lessons learned in developing a state court online portal dedicated to educating abuse victims and providing them with an automated way to petition the court for protection orders remotely without the need to visit a courthouse. …

Broken Infrastructure, Del C. Wright Jr.

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No abstract provided.

Artificial Agents In Corporate Boardrooms, Sergio Alberto Gramitto Ricci

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Thousands of years ago, Roman businessmen often ran joint businesses through commonly owned, highly intelligent slaves. Roman slaves did not have full legal capacity and were considered property of their co-owners. Now business corporations are looking to delegate decision-making to uber intelligent machines through the use of artificial intelligence in boardrooms. Artificial intelligence in boardrooms could assist, integrate, or even replace human directors. However, the concept of using artificial intelligence in boardrooms is largely unexplored and raises several issues. This Article sheds light on legal and policy challenges concerning artificial agents in boardrooms. The arguments revolve around two fundamental questions: …

Law, Artificial Intelligence, And Natural Language Processing: A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To My Search Results, Paul D. Callister

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Renowned legal educator Roscoe Pound stated, “Law must be stable and yet it cannot stand still.” Yet, as Susan Nevelow Mart has demonstrated in a seminal article that the different online research services (Westlaw, Lexis Advance, Fastcase, Google Scholar, Ravel and Casetext) produce significantly different results when researching case law. Furthermore, a recent study of 325 federal courts of appeals decisions, revealed that only 16% of the cases cited in appellate briefs make it into the courts’ opinions. This does not exactly inspire confidence in legal research or its tools to maintain stability of the law. As Robert Berring foresaw, …

The Supreme Court’S Devaluation Of U.S. Patents, Christopher M. Holman

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In a span of three weeks during the spring of 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court issued three patent decisions, bringing the total number of patent decisions for the 2016-2017 term to six. This means that the October 2016 term ties the previous record of six patent decisions in the October 2014 term. This represents a tremendous increase in the number of patent decisions compared to earlier times, and particularly the early days of the Federal Circuit. For reference, during the first quarter of a century the Federal Circuit was in existence, the Supreme Court heard on average less than one …

In Defense Of Secondary Pharmaceutical Patents: Response To The Un's Guidelines For Pharmaceutical Patent Examination, Christopher M. Holman

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In 2015 the United Nations Development Programme issued a document entitled Guidelines for Pharmaceutical Patent Examination: Examining Pharmaceutical Patents from a Public Health Perspective (the “Guidelines”). The heart of the Guidelines is a category-by-category examination of eight types of “secondary” pharmaceutical patent claims: Markush claims; selection patents; polymorphs; enantiomers; salts; ethers and esters; compositions; doses; combinations; prodrugs; metabolites; and new medical uses. The Guidelines advise patent offices to apply heightened patentability requirements to these claims in a manner that would effectively deny patent protection to important pharmaceutical innovations currently afforded patent protection. In particular, the Guidelines postulate that many forms …

Fda’S Efforts To Tame The 'Wild West' Of Regenerative Medicine, Christopher M. Holman

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Stem cell-based regenerative therapies hold the potential to address a host of health concerns, particularly congenital, age-related, and trauma-induced injuries, and diseases involving organ and tissue degeneration, conditions that have proven refractory to conventional drug-based approaches. For the time being, however, there is little in the way of solid evidence supporting the safety and efficacy of most cell-based therapeutic approaches (with the notable exception of hematopoietic stem cells used to treat diseases of the blood and immune system). This Holman Report begins with an overview of the current uncertain regulatory status of regenerative medicine in the U.S., including several draft …

Charting The Contours Of Copyright Regime Optimized For Engineered Genetic Code, Christopher M. Holman

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There is a growing disconnect between the traditional patent-centric approach to protecting biotechnological innovation and the emerging intellectual property imperatives of “synthetic biology,” a promising new manifestation of biotechnology that enables the design and construction of artificial biological pathways, organisms or devices, as well as the redesign of existing natural biological systems. As explained in previous articles, one way to deal with this disconnect would be to expand the scope of copyrightable subject matter to encompass engineered genetic sequences, much in the way that copyright was expanded in the 1970s and 1980s to include computer programs. The present article expands …

The Mayo Framework Is Bad For Your Health, Christopher M. Holman

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This Article begins by providing a brief historical retrospective of the development of the patent eligibility doctrine, and then delves into the related questions of: (1) what are the Supreme Court’s policy objectives for the recent reinvigoration of the patent eligibility doctrine; and (2) has it achieved those objectives? The article then discusses three important out-standing questions regarding the application of the new test for patent eligibility: (1) what constitutes a natural phenomenon; (2) what constitutes an inventive step; and (3) what, if any, role does preemption play in the analysis? The article then provides four examples of recent lower …

Are Engineered Genetic Sequences Copyrightable?: The U.S. Copyright Office Addresses A Matter Of First Impression, Christopher M. Holman, Claes Gustafsson, Andrew W. Torrance

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In spite of the compelling logic that would support extending copyright to engineered DNA sequences, copyright protection for genetic code has not been legally recognized in the US, or as far as we know anywhere. The Copyright Act is silent on the point, the courts do not appear to have ever addressed the question, and the Copyright Office has taken the position that an engineered genetic sequence is not copyrightable subject matter. In an attempt to advance the conversation, we submitted an engineered DNA sequence to the Copyright Office for registration, and then appealed the Office’s decision refusing to register …

How Real Is The Concern That Seed Patents Will Turn Farmers Into Inadvertent Infringers?, Christopher M. Holman

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The fear that farmers could be found liable for patent infringement based on the inadvertent presence of patented genetically modified plants on the farmer’s fields has led to calls for limitations on the scope and enforceability of patents. These “reforms” would be especially problematic for agricultural biotechnology companies like Monsanto, but the repercussions could be more widespread, impacting a host of important cutting-edge technologies like synthetic biology and nanotechnology. Although stories of farmers being sued by Monsanto after their fields where inadvertently contaminated by genetic drift are widely circulated, inadvertent infringement based upon genetic drift or the presence of trace …

Fixing A Hole: Eliminating Ownership Uncertainties To Facilitate University-Generated Innovation, Anthony J. Luppino

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No abstract provided.

Introduction: Symposium On Law, Entrepreneurship, And Economic Recovery, Anthony J. Luppino

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No abstract provided.

Law And Heidegger’S Question Concerning Technology: Prolegomenon To Future Law Librarianship, Paul D. Callister

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Following World War II, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger offered one of the most potent criticisms of technology and modern life. His nightmare is a world whose essence has been reduced to the functional equivalent of a giant gasoline station, an energy source for modern technology and industry. "This relation of man to the world [is] in principle a technical one . . . [It is] altogether alien to former ages and histories. For Heidegger, the problem is not technology itself, but the technical mode of thinking that has accompanied it." Such a viewpoint of the world is a useful …

Introduction – 21st Century Law, Technology And Ethics: The Lawyer’S Role As A Public Citizen Serving The Public Good, Irma S. Russell

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The lawyer's role as a "public citizen" also involves a duty to "seek improvement of the law." Changing technology has changed the way lawyers practice law. As public citizens lawyers have an affirmative commitment to the social goal of a just society. Ethical issues arise in the use of technology in society, and lawyers play a central role in social ordering. The idea that advocates in an adversary system have special responsibilities is not new.

Protein Similarity Score: Simplified Version Of The Blast Score As Superior Alternative To Percent Identity For Claiming Genuses Of Related Protein Sequences, Christopher M. Holman

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Recombinant proteins form the basis for most of the products of biotechnology, including drugs, diagnostics, research reagents, genetically modified organisms and industrial enzymes. However, the nature of proteins and the rules of patentability conspire to make it difficult to achieve adequate patent protection for novel proteins and the polynucleotides that encode them. Narrow patent claims limited to protein sequences sharing a high degree of structural identity can generally be designed around by introducing structural changes in the claimed protein, thereby avoiding the patent without substantially altering the protein's function. However, inventors are generally restricted in their ability to broadly claim …

The Internet, Regulation And The Market For Loyalties: An Economic Analysis Of Transborder Information Flow, Paul D. Callister

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As the Internet has gained prevalence, attention has turned to its regulation. Indeed, regulation proves to be a unique and complex problem, given the Internet's lack of traditional borders and boundaries. Highlighting possible avenues of regulation, the author discusses neo-classical economic theory, specifically Monroe E. Price's market for loyalties theory. Although originally applied to the regulation of broadcasting, the author contends that the market for loyalties theory can also be applied to the Internet. Building on Professor Price's pioneering analysis, the article extends the theory to examine market elasticity's effect on the loss of monopoly control over information flow (as …

Listening To Tribal Legends: An Essay On Law And The Scientific Method, Nancy Levit

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Much of jurisprudence is storytelling, recounting tales of what has gone before; improvising and crafting new stories of legal theory from old ones. Useful kernels are passed from one generation of legal thinkers to the next. Like tribal legends, the messages in many stories of jurisprudence can be understood only by a select audience. Legends often come with morals; theories of jurisprudence often impart prescription for living within the law. Jurisprudence, like legends, concerns fundamental issues, confronts cosmic questions and weaves in magic. Sometimes both possess humor as well.

Unfortunately, some modern versions of jurisprudential theories have become anecdotal. The …

Toward Better Environmental Standard Setting: Lessons From Case Study, Douglas O. Linder

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No abstract provided.