Law Commons^™

The Supreme Court's Quiet Revolution In Induced Patent Infringement, Timothy R. Holbrook

Faculty Articles

The Supreme Court over the last decade or so has reengaged with patent law. While much attention has been paid to the Court’s reworking of what constitutes patent-eligible subject matter and enhancing tools to combat “patent trolls,” what many have missed is the Court’s reworking of the contours of active inducement of patent infringement under 35 U.S.C. § 271(b). The Court has taken the same number of § 271(b) cases as subject matter eligibility cases—four. Yet this reworking has not garnered much attention in the literature. This Article offers the first comprehensive assessment of the Court’s efforts to define active …

Miranda 2.0, Tonja Jacobi

Faculty Articles

Fifty years after Miranda v. Arizona, significant numbers of innocent suspects are falsely confessing to crimes while subject to police custodial interrogation. Critics on the left and right have proposed reforms to Miranda, but few such proposals are appropriately targeted to the problem of false confessions. Using rigorous psychological evidence of the causes of false confessions, this Article analyzes the range of proposals and develops a realistic set of reforms — Miranda 2.0 — which is directed specifically at this foundational challenge to the justice system. Miranda 2.0 is long overdue; it should require: warning suspects how long they …

Evidence Laundering In A Post-Herring World, Kay L. Levine, Jenia I. Turner, Ronald F. Wright

Faculty Articles

The Supreme Court’s decision in Herring v. United States authorizes police to defeat the Fourth Amendment’s protections through a process we call evidence laundering. Evidence laundering occurs when one police officer makes a constitutional mistake when gathering evidence and then passes that evidence along to a second officer, who develops it further and then delivers it to prosecutors for use in a criminal case. The original constitutional taint disappears in the wash.

Courts have allowed evidence laundering in a variety of contexts, from cases involving flawed databases to cases stemming from faulty judgments and communication lapses in law enforcement teams. …

Sorting: Legal Specialization And The Privatization Of The American Legal Profession, Michael S. Ariens

Faculty Articles

Beginning in the 1950s, legal specialization was promoted to the majority of the American legal profession, small firm and solo practice lawyers, by the elite of the bar as the future of legal professionalism. Legal specialization was a form of sorting lawyers, and sorting was contrary to the traditional understanding of an undivided legal profession. Over the course of the next thirty years, this effort succeeded. This new understanding of legal professionalism emphasized the idea of competence based on a deep but particularized knowledge of law. This resulted in a slipping away of the beliefs that law was a public …