Digital Commons Network^™

The High Cost Of Federal Cannabis Prohibition, Michael Hunter

Student Works

No abstract provided.

Abandonment Via International Surrogacy, Rosemary Ferreira

Student Works

No abstract provided.

Nonfatal Death Sentences, Jacob Bronsther

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Disability, Policing, And Punishment: An Intersectional Approach, Jamelia Morgan

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Antibody Claims And The Evolution Of The Written Description/Enablement Requirement, S Sean Tu, Christopher M. Holman

Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Technology Changes Drive Legal Changes For Antibody Patents: What Patent Examiners Can Teach Courts About The Written Description And Enablement Requirements., S. Sean Tu, Christopher M. Holman

Faculty Works

Antibody patents form the basis of some of the most valuable biotechnology products on the market. In 2020 alone, the sales of the top three drugs exceed 10 billion dollars. Two of those three drugs are monoclonal antibodies (Humira and Keytruda). In the past, patent law offered broad protection for monoclonal antibodies. As time has progressed, however, courts have narrowed the scope of antibody patents. However, very little research has been done to see how patent examiners are applying the rules of patentability to these valuable antibody patents.

We examine approximately two decades worth of antibody patents to determine how …

Change Is Nothing New Teaching Public Policy, Nicholas W. Allard

Saint Louis University Law Journal

This Article addresses the paradox that change is nothing new for those who teach aspiring lawyers how to effectively engage in the reality of the complex public policy arena. It rejects the notion that money buys results, and success is merely a matter of quick-fix influence peddling and personal relationships. Instead, to teach students how to provide public policy analysis, advice, and advocacy, teachers must help them understand and be prepared for a relentlessly dynamic, continuously evolving professional ecosystem where the very object of the work is to either advance or forestall legal change, often involving issues contested on multiple …

A World Without Roe: The Constitutional Future Of Unwanted Pregnancy, Julie Suk

Faculty Scholarship

With the demise of Roe v. Wade, the survival of abortion access in America will depend on new legal paths. In the same moment that Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has constrained access to abortion in the United States, other constitutional democracies have moved in the opposite direction, expanding access to safe, legal, and free abortions. They have done so without reasoning from Roe’s vision of the private zone of unwanted pregnancy. The development of abortion law outside the United States provides critical insights that can inform future efforts to vindicate the constitutional rights of women facing unwanted pregnancies. …

Protecting Our At-Risk Communities From The Ground(Water) Up: Cafos, The Clean Water Act, And A Framework For Offering Clarity To An Imprecise Maui Test, Shawn D. Ren

Emory Law Journal

For rural communities across the country, the problems associated with concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) are nothing new. These industrial-sized operations emit a tremendous amount of waste, polluting the surrounding air, land, and water. In many regions, minority, indigent, and uneducated groups disproportionately bear the ill-effects of these inhumane operations. Under the Clean Water Act, CAFOs are explicitly included in the definition of a point source and are thus subject to the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permitting requirements, which regulates the discharge of pollutants. However, many operations do not fit within this regulatory scheme as they do not …

When A Statute Comes With A User Manual: Reconciling Textualism And Uniform Acts, Gregory A. Elinson, Robert H. Sitkoff

Emory Law Journal

This Article develops an interpretive theory for statutes that originate as Uniform Acts promulgated by the Uniform Law Commission. Although overlooked in the literature on statutory interpretation, state-enacted Uniform Acts are ubiquitous. They shape our life cycles—governing marriage, parentage, divorce, and death—and structure trillions of dollars in daily commercial transactions.

Largely focusing on textualism, today’s dominant form of statutory interpretation, we analyze the interpretive consequences of two unusual features of state-enacted Uniform Acts. First, the text of every Uniform Act directs courts to interpret it to “promote uniformity.” Second, each provision is accompanied by an official explanatory comment, analogous to …

Battleground Of The Opioid Crisis: The Eighth Amendment Right To Medication-Assisted Treatment In Prisons And Jails, And Upon Release, Claire E. Scavone

Emory Law Journal

About eighty percent of all inmates in the United States need but will not receive treatment for their Opioid Use Disorder (OUD). Instead, they will leave prison with a 140 times greater chance of a fatal overdose than before their prison sentence. Although incarceration is conceivably an opportune time for the state to connect individuals with treatment, only about one percent of prisons and jails allow the use of Medication-Assisted Treatment (MAT). This failure has a myriad of causes. Notably, beliefs that OUD is a moral failure and that MAT either does not work or is dangerous are both among …

Normative Systems And Human Rights, Richard S. Kay

Emory Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Plight Of Western Rivers, W. Howard Brandenburg

Natural Resources Journal

My oil paintings weave a narrative about the human species. I am interested in the space where our proliferation infringes upon ecosystem function. I am fascinated in what makes our species so successful and what that success means for the balance of nature. My paintings often target concepts around environmental transformations attributed to human activities and economies. Visual art provides me the latitude and freedom to explore and communicate these concepts, using a visual language which conveys disparate perspectives; universally and individualistically.

This duality is what I strive for in my work; producing an image that not only speaks a …

Premature Grey Wolf Delisting, Dr. Edward A. Fitzgerald

Natural Resources Journal

On November 3, 2020 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (“FWS”)1 issued “Removing the Gray Wolf (Canis Lupus) From the List of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife” (“Final Rule”) delisting the gray wolf in forty-eight states, except for the Mexican gray wolf in the Southwest.2 This Final Rule returned gray wolf management to the states. Wolf delisting was a last-minute gift from the Trump administration to conservative voters, particularly hunters, trappers, and livestock owners right before the November 2020 presidential election. Hunters and trappers view the wolf as a competitor for the game that they want to kill, while livestock owners …

Racism And Stress: How A Zero Sum Approach Harms The Sum Of Us, Laura Chyu, Erin Grinshteyn

Journal of Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Scholarship

Experiencing racism is a pervasive and persistent stressor that not only negatively impacts the health of people of color (POC), but all members of a population, including Whites. This essay discusses how experiencing racism over a lifetime may cause wear and tear on the body and increase risk for premature disease, disability, and death. The authors explore how racial capitalism has created a deeply flawed economic system that exploits POC and foments hostility among working-class whites towards POC. Blue collar workers of all races currently suffer from economic misery and social malaise. Recent alarming trends of increases in death rates …

What We Ask Of Law, Aziz Z. Huq

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

A minimal, reasonably uncontroversial, demand of a legal system is that it should stabilize a polity against the chance hazards of ordinary violence and soften the blows of extraordinary, destabilizing misfortune. Law in the contemporary United States, however, has not abated the lethal toll of violent crime, the serial mass shootings of children, the endless flow of racialized police violence, or even the toll of insurrectionary violence that shadows democratic politics. The gap between law’s operation in practice and its ultimate aspirations toward social order offers a hint that something in our dominant working model of law, and its relation …

Institutional Choice For Software Safety Standards, Bryan H. Choi

Publications

The pursuit of software safety standards has stalled. In response, commentators and policymakers have looked increasingly to federal agencies to deliver new hope. Some place their faith in existing agencies while others propose a new super agency to oversee software-specific issues. This turn reflects both optimism in the agency model as well as pessimism in other institutions such as the judiciary or private markets.

This Essay argues that the agency model is not a silver bullet. Applying a comparative institutional choice lens, this Essay explains that the characteristic strengths of the agency model—expertise, uniformity, and efficiency—offer less advantage than one …

A Machete For The Patent Thicket: Using Noerr-Pennington Doctrine’S Sham Exception To Challenge Abusive Patent Tactics By Pharmaceutical Companies, Lisa Orucevic

Vanderbilt Law Review

Outrageous drug prices have dominated news coverage of the American healthcare system for years. Yet despite widespread condemnation of skyrocketing drug prices, nothing seems to change. Pharmaceutical companies can raise drug prices with impunity because they hold patents on their drugs, which give them monopolies. These monopolies are only supposed to last twenty years, and then competing lower-cost drugs like generics can enter the market, driving down the costs of pharmaceuticals for all. But pharmaceutical companies have created “patent thickets,” dense webs of overlapping patents surrounding one drug, which have artificially extended the companies’ monopolies for years or even decades …

Supreme Confusion About Causality At The Supreme Court, Issa Kohler-Hausmann, Robin Dembroff

City University of New York Law Review

Twice in the 2020 term, in Bostock and Comcast, the Supreme Court doubled down on a particular interpretation of how “but-for causation” applies to antidiscrimination statutes. According to the Court’s reasoning, an outcome is discriminatory because of some status—say, sex or race—if the outcome would not have occurred “but-for” the plaintiff’s status. We think this reasoning embeds profound conceptual errors that render the decisions deeply confused. Furthermore, those conceptual errors tend to limit the reach of antidiscrimination law. In this essay, we first unpack the ambiguity of the Court’s interpretation and application of but-for causal reasoning. We then show that …

Who’S Afraid Of Bob Jones? “Fundamental National Public Policy” And Critical Race Theory In A Delicate Democracy, Lynn D. Lu

City University of New York Law Review

Calls to defund critical race theory aim to freeze civil rights progress where it stood decades ago with the formal prohibition of intentional race discrimination in federally funded programs. In the notorious case of Bob Jones University v. United States, 461 U.S. 574 (1983), the U.S. Supreme Court confronted the federal tax exemption for public charities and ruled that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) properly withheld tax-exempt status from otherwise qualifying private religious schools that denied admission to students based on race. In particular, the Bob Jones Court recognized the “fundamental national public policy” against racial segregation as a compelling …

Domestic Violence And Leave Laws: How New York Can Improve Its Leave Policies Based On The Laws Of Washington, D.C. And New Jersey, Nusrat J. Khan

City University of New York Law Review

Although intimate partner violence often starts in the privacy of one’s home, its impact spills over in almost all aspects of the victim’s life. The effects of violence are tangible – physical and emotional harm to the person and their dependents, loss of educational or employment opportunities, financial problems, interactions with the criminal justice system, and ongoing legal issues. To address the loss of employment, federal and state governments have implemented leave laws to offer job protection for victims of intimate partner violence. Leave laws are an essential aspect of employment as the ability to take leave from work provides …

Exploring The Impact Of Student Conduct Models On Student Development At Hbcus, Deona Cureton

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The effectiveness of the student conduct approaches of the mixed method model, a mixture of restorative justice and traditional sanctioning, and traditional sanctioning, known as the “model code,” in student learning at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) has been largely unexamined in existing literature. This quantitative study examined whether the model code process or a mixed method model process is more effective and efficient in producing learning and accountability. The present study utilized the 28-item questionnaire from the Student Accountability and Restorative Research (STARR) Project, a multicampus study conducted in 2011 in the United States. In the current study, …

The Need For Social Support From Law Schools During The Era Of Social Distancing, Michele Okoh, Inès Ndonko Nnoko

FIU Law Review

Law students have been faced with unparalleled stress during the syndemic. They must cope with being students during the COVID-19 pandemic but also must deal with stress related to social and political unrest. This essay recommends that law schools apply social support theory in developing interventions to effectively address the needs of law students now and in the future. Social support theory focuses on the value and benefits one receives from positive interpersonal relationships. These positive relationships impact both mental and physical health and promote beneficial short and long-term overall health. However, not all supports are the same, and social …

Stereotypes, Sexism, And Superhuman Faculty, Teneille R. Brown

FIU Law Review

This symposium article explores how law professors with caretaking responsibilities struggled so greatly during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Because legal academia prioritizes masculine ideals of competence over warmth, faculty were expected to suppress their emotions and mental health needs in order to maintain the appearance of competence. While students were allowed to be seen as vulnerable individuals needing accommodations, we did not extend this same compassion to our faculty colleagues. To explain why the treatment was so disparate, I incorporated existing research on the stereotype content model (SCM) and psychological theories of dehumanization. These theories help to …

Law And Literature In The Work Of Robert Cover, Tawia Ansah

Touro Law Review

This Article argues that although Robert Cover seems to discount the role and the practical efficacy of literary texts within the context of legal interpretation, Cover’s work nevertheless discloses an extensive exploration of literature and of literary interpretation to frame his own legal interpretive practices. This is particularly the case regarding the development of his theory of law’s violence. The Article attempts to show that a close reading of Cover’s interpretation of literary texts in the service of his legal analyses discloses a buried theme pursuant to the violence of law: the threshold concept, between law and not-law, of the …

Reflections On Nomos: Paideic Communities And Same Sex Weddings, Marie A. Failinger

Touro Law Review

Robert Cover’s Nomos and Narrative is an instructive tale for the constitutional battle over whether religious wedding vendors must be required to serve same-sex couples. He helps us see how contending communities’ deep narratives of martyrdom and obedience to the values of their paideic communities can be silenced by the imperial community’s insistence on choosing one community’s story over another community’s in adjudication. The wedding vendor cases call for an alternative to jurispathic violence, for a constitutionally redemptive response that prizes a nomos of inclusion and respect for difference.

Bridges Of Law, Ideology, And Commitment, Steven L. Winter

Touro Law Review

Law has a distinctive temporal structure—an ontology—that defines it as a social institution. Law knits together past, present, purpose, and projected future into a demand for action. Robert Cover captures this dynamic in his metaphor of law as a bridge to an imagined future. Law’s orientation to the future necessarily poses the question of commitment or complicity. For law can shape the future only when people act to make it real. Cover’s bridge metaphor provides a lens through which to explore the complexities of law’s ontology and the pathologies that arise from its neglect or misuse. A bridge carries us …

The Limitations And Alternatives To Expanding The Equal Pay Act Under Bostock V. Clayton County, Ga., Valentina Wilson

University of San Francisco Law Review

No abstract provided.

American Motherhood - A Taking, Nicole Knight

Mitchell Hamline Law Journal of Public Policy and Practice

No abstract provided.

Educators’ Perception Of Their Psychosocial Support Of Elementary Students In Gabon, Africa, Michel Ikamba

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Although educators internationally have often provided care to vulnerable students who struggle to meet the needs of nutrition, health, protection, and access to essential social services, no formal social systems exist in Gabon to aid educators who work with these students. In the absence of relevant local research and drawing on Dewey’s theory of progressive education as a conceptual model, this basic qualitative study asked about educators’ perceptions in limited resource elementary schools in Gabon of the social needs and strategies employed with students who demonstrated signs of disengagement and alienation. Qualitative data collection included semi-structured recorded interviews with 12 …