Law Commons^™

The Supreme Court Decisions On Guns And Abortion Relied Heavily On History. But Whose History?, Allison Orr Larsen

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Normalizing Reproductive Genetic Innovation, Myrisha S. Lewis

Faculty Publications

Many societally accepted techniques were quite controversial at inception and for decades after. For example, historically, dialysis was “unnatural,” vaccination was “the poisoned quill,” and artificial insemination was akin to adultery. Despite social and cultural hurdles, the aforementioned medical techniques have today attained overall public acceptance, permissive legal treatment, and even health insurance coverage in some cases.

Unlike many now-routine treatments like in vitro fertilization (IVF), egg freezing, and organ transplantation, which flourished without significant governmental intervention, today’s controversial medical treatments, especially those involving reproductive genetic innovation, face intense regulatory barriers. Reproductive genetic innovation, which is the combination of IVF …

Pleasure Patents, Andrew Gilden, Sarah R. Wasserman Rajec

Faculty Publications

The United States Patent and Trademark Office has granted thousands of patents for inventions whose purpose is to facilitate the sexual pleasure of their users. These "pleasure patents" raise a range of novel questions about both patent theory and the relationship between law and sexuality more broadly. Given that "immoral" inventions were long excluded from the patent system, and that sexual devices were widely criminalized for much of the past 150 years, how have patentees successfully framed the contributions of their sexual inventions? If a patentable invention must be both new and useful, how have patentees described the utility of …