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Bridging the fair share gap for antibacterial innovation: an observational analysis of antibacterial revenues in the G7 and EU27
Get PDFBackground Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) poses an important global health challenge, including insufficient investment in research and development. This study quantifies the required “fair share” contributions from the G7+EU27 countries for an effective set of pull incentives for antibacterial research and development. Methods Fair share targets within the G7+EU27 were calculated from GDP data and revenue targets from the literature, adjusted for inflation. Cefiderocol and ceftazidime-avibactam were selected as representative of key antibacterials. Revenues and volumes from IQVIA MIDAS data on these drugs were used to assess alignment with fair share targets. The study period was January 2015–December 2024. Findings The G7+EU27 low-end, mid-range, and high-end annual revenue targets are US363, and US$562 million in global revenues (USD 2024), respectively, consistently over ten years. An antibiotic meeting the mid-range target would be 230th in a global rank of drugs by revenues. While the UK and Italy are on track to meet annual mid-range targets going forward, other G7 countries are not, and only Italy has met cumulative mid-range targets for both drugs. Interpretation Collectively, the G7+EU27 has not met cumulative mid-range targets. The UK meets mid-range annual targets going forward due to its antimicrobial subscription program. Italy meets mid-range targets due to higher use and may continue to meet them due to an “orphan” reimbursement fund for antibiotics. German, French, and Japanese antibacterial pull incentives have not met the mid-range targets. No G7 member meets high-end targets at current unit prices or volumes. A revenue guarantee pull incentive designed to top-up market revenues could support innovation and accelerate access without relying on higher prices or volumes. Progress in the UK and Italy demonstrates that meeting fair share targets are achievable within different national contexts. Funding MG was supported by a post-doctoral fellowship at Boston University. ASK\u27s work was funded by Arnold Ventures and International Collaborative Bioscience Innovation & Law Programme (Novo Nordisk Foundation grant number NNF23SA0087056). While KO is Executive Director of CARB-X, this work was not funded under any CARB-X grant
Normalizing Facial Recognition Technology and the End of Obscurity
Get PDFThis article argues that facial recognition technology is the most dangerous surveillance tool ever invented. Given the unique threats this morally suspect tool poses to privacy, civil liberties, human flourishing, and democracy, the only appropriate response is a ban. To justify our position, we explain why facial recognition is distinctive among biometrics, clarify how even seemingly benign and positive uses of the technology can trigger dangerous normalization dynamics, and pinpoint why current United States laws (with reverberations in the EU’s AI Act) are designed to accelerate a slippery slope that makes mass surveillance nearly inevitable. Our most fundamental contribution lies in demonstrating how the concept of “obscurity” connects all three arguments: facial recognition algorithms technologically eviscerate obscurity, normalization psychologically undermines it, and the law doctrinally abandons it - a perfect storm that only prohibition can stop
Civilian Enforcers
Get PDFThis Article analyzes the largely unexplored phenomenon of militant civilians engaged in efforts to police and silence activism that challenges entrenched American power systems and economic distributions placing whites atop the social hierarchy in the United States. I argue that this civilian enforcement is an unregulated vessel for state-sponsored violence meant to silence the contestation of the existing racial hierarchy. While scholars, myself included, have written about the many ways police confront and silence racial justice activists on the streets at least since the beginning of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, the role law enforcement plays in silencing racial justice movements is only part a larger state-sponsored effort to preserve existing racial hierarchies. Supplementing violent policing from law enforcement actors, militant right-wing civilians descend on public streets ready to battle BLM activists. These mostly white, often armed, civilians are force multipliers of state efforts to suppress BLM voices, whose demands for a reevaluation of established distributions of power and wealth ignite fear and resentment among certain whites. Yet, vigilantes’ efforts evade constitutional examination because of their nature as non-state actors. However, police routinely tolerate or even collaborate with these civilian vigilantes, while simultaneously focusing violent enforcement efforts on BLM protesters. I argue that this pattern of disparate police enforcement, where racial justice activists are violently policed while civilian enforcers evade punishment, effectively transforms civilian vigilantes into unregulated state-sponsored violence workers. This is reminiscent of the antebellum South, where the state delegated legal authority to all whites to forcibly enforce laws that suppressed Black expression and any sentiment that endorsed Black liberation, thus showing that the suppression of Black liberation ideologies by state-sponsored civilian enforcers persists even toda
When Anti-Fraud Laws Become a Barrier to Computer Science Research
Get PDFComputer science research sometimes brushes with the law, from red-team exercises that probe the boundaries of authentication mechanisms, to AI research processing copyrighted material, to platform research measuring the behavior of algorithms and users. U.S.-based computer security research is no stranger to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in a relationship that is still evolving through case law, research practices, changing policies, and legislation
Amid the landscape computer scientists, lawyers, and policymakers have learned to navigate, anti-fraud laws are a surprisingly under-examined challenge for computer science research. Fraud brings separate issues that are not addressed by the methods for navigating CFAA, DMCA, and Terms of Service that are more familiar in the computer security literature. Although anti-fraud laws have been discussed to a limited extent in older research on phishing attacks, modern computer science researchers are left with little guidance when it comes to navigating issues of deception outside the context of pure laboratory research.
In this paper, we analyze and taxonomize the anti-fraud and deception issues that arise in several areas of computer science research. We find that, despite the lack of attention to these issues in the legal and computer science literature, issues of misrepresented identity or false information that could implicate anti-fraud laws are actually relevant to many methodologies used in computer science research, including penetration testing, web scraping, user studies, sock puppets, social engineering, auditing AI or socio-technical systems, and attacks on artificial intelligence. We especially highlight the importance of anti-fraud laws in two particular research fields that are of great policy importance in the current moment: attacking or auditing AI systems, and research involving legal identification.
Finally, guided by principles in research ethics, we suggest methods for computer scientists to navigate fraud and identity issues, as well as possible legal paths forward for policymakers to consider
Data manipulation within the US Federal Government
No full textA US Department of Veterans Affairs dataset compiling veteran health-care use in 2021 was quietly amended on March 5, 2025. A column titled gender was renamed sex, and the words were also switched in the dataset title and description (appendix p 1). Before March 5, the dataset had not been modified since it was published in 2022. As of May 1, the dataset change log, in which modifications should be tracked, is empty.1 The switch from gender to sex also occurred in other public health datasets, including US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) datasets tracking global adult tobacco consumption, stroke mortality data from 2015 to 2017, and a survey of nutrition, physical activity, and obesity (appendix pp 4–9). The agencies involved have not issued any statements confirming or explaining these changes, but they could be intended to comply with a Presidential directive for agencies to remove “messages that promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology”
On Simple Competition Policy
No full textThese remarks address the topic of “simple competition policy for a complex world”.[1] There is much to be said in favor of simplicity in legal rules. Complex legal rules are often difficult for the individuals who must comply with the rules to understand what they mean. Complex rules are often confusing, and take a long time to understand, when in the real business world decisions must be made quickly – at the pace at which business occurs. Businessmen do not have the luxury that academics possess to read, discuss, and think about rules for long periods of time. Markets often force them to act before having the time to fully understand a complex environment.
Complex rules, because they often create clouds of confusion, permit regulators to act with inordinate discretion in interpreting the rules. Discretion opens the door for the private preferences of regulators to determine how rules will be enforced.[2] The result of this process may be a system directed by individual preferences rather than laws or rules.
The Roman emperor Caligula posted his edicts so high that ordinary Roman citizens could not read them.[3] This is equivalent to having complex rules
Religious Liberty as a Shield for Public Health — The Case of Overdose-Prevention Centers
No full textIn numerous legal cases in the United States, going back decades, litigants have asserted religious liberty as a sword to strike down public health measures. Recently, however, courts have recognized that religious liberty can also serve as a shield — including for institutions without religious affiliations.
A federal appeals court ruling in United States v. Safehouse could mark a shift in the way courts treat efforts to prevent drug overdoses and to support public health more broadly.1 In July 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit held that Safehouse, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit organization seeking to open an overdose-prevention center (OPC), may assert religious-liberty claims to override federal controlled-substances law, despite being a nonreligious organization. Although the decision appears to be narrow — limited to the question of whether a nonreligious entity can bring a claim asserting religious liberty — it may open the door to a new legal defense for harm-reduction interventions in a hostile political climate
Replacement Opening Brief for Plaintiff-Appellant Timothy Olmos
No full textToday, nearly everyone relies on a cellphone. Many use their phones to store a wealth of private information, including conversations over text messages and emails; photographs of family, friends, pets, and joyous occasions; and confidential banking and medical records. The Supreme Court, therefore, regards a cellphone search as one that “typically expose[s] to the government far more than the most exhaustive search of a house.”
The Supreme Court also recognizes that despite the legal status of people subject to probation conditions, probationers still retain Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches. And this Court has held that probationers, who like almost everyone else in society, rely on cellphones, retain a “substantial” privacy interest in their cellphone data.
But when Plaintiff-Appellant Timothy Olmos attended a mandatory meeting with two probation officers, Defendants-Appellees Armida Prieto and Erwinn Hernandez searched Olmos’s cellphone without a warrant and without reasonable suspicion. In the middle of the meeting, Olmos received an unexpected call from an auto insurance agent. Olmos silenced the call to avoid disrupting the meeting. Then, Prieto and Hernandez demanded that Olmos surrender possession of his phone. Olmos complied. Indeed, he did not think he had a right to refuse and was afraid that discipline or retaliation might follow if he did not hand over his phone. Prieto and Hernandez proceeded to search, not through the cellphone’s call log, but rather through Olmos’s photo gallery. Prieto and Hernandez have never argued that they believed Olmos was violating a particular probation condition or that they had particularized suspicion that he was committing a crime.
The Fourth Amendment protects Olmos from unreasonable searches like the one conducted by Prieto and Hernandez. It is deeply rooted in our constitutional tradition that it is unreasonable for the government to “rummage” through personal property “in an unrestrained search” for evidence of wrongdoing. This Court should look askance at Defendants’ arguments claiming the authority to do so. When Prieto and Hernandez searched through Olmos’s photos without suspicion, these officers ignored Olmos’s reasonable expectation of privacy and violated his Fourth Amendment rights. Accordingly, this Court should reverse the district court’s grant of summary judgment and remand for further proceedings
Environmental Justice: A Very Short Introduction
No full textEnvironmental justice recognizes that environmental benefits and burdens should be distributed fairly, and that the people making policy decisions should incorporate the views of those most often harmed: people of color, Indigenous populations, low-income communities, and those who are underserved and disenfranchised for other reasons such as age, gender, or disability. It encompasses not only traditional environmental issues like clean air and clean water, but also social issues such as employment, nutrition, and access to health care. Although environmental justice is a relatively recent concept, it has become a focus of governmental environmental policy, UN actions, and the activities of many nongovernmental environmental organizations. Its development tracks our growing understanding of racism and wealth disparity in the US and elsewhere, and of our understanding of inequality between the Global North and the Global South. In the era of climate change, climate justice is a particular focus.In an engaging and approachable way, Environmental Justice: A Very Short Introduction defines the concept, identifies specific environmental justice populations, examines root causes, including racism, capitalism, and colonialism, and traces the history of the environmental justice movement and governmental responses to it. It concludes with suggestions for achieving this elusive goal.https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/books/1379/thumbnail.jp