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Clinical Trial Transparency - Antidote to Increased Off-label Promotion?
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Clinical trial transparency will improve the accuracy and reliability of biomedical science, while also reducing the burdens on both trial participants and sponsors
The Law Student\u27s Quick Guide to Legal Citation, 3rd Edition
No full textA guide to basic legal citation for new law students and anyone else interested.https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/books/1334/thumbnail.jp
Space Madness: Subsidies and Economic Substance
Get PDFExtending the reach of the recently codified economic substance doctrine to embrace transactions spurred by tax subsidies would help both Congress and taxpayers promote worthy objectives such as historic preservation and the production of renewable energy. Congress-or quite possibly the courts-could use losses as the lynchpin of an economic substance doctrine for subsidized transactions
Live and Let Die: Puerto Rico — The Unincorporated Jewel of the Caribbean
Get PDFPuerto Rico is a commonwealth of the United States. However, the ambiguous meaning of that phrase has allowed for inconsistent treatment of Puerto Rico by the Supreme Court of the United States. This short article briefly tackles the manner in which the federal government most recently applied the federal death penalty to Puerto Rico despite the island\u27s constitutional ban against capital punishment
An Empirical Method for Harmless Error
Get PDFTrials are often imperfect. When inadmissible evidence is introduced or the jury is incorrectly instructed, judges must determine whether the error was prejudicial or merely harmless. In making that assessment, judges resort to speculation about the counterfactual question of whether the error changed the outcome, compared to the decision of a properly informed and instructed jury. These decisions are likely colored by confirmation and status quo biases, along with “mental contamination” of the error itself. Even when appellate judges perform these analyses accurately, their decisions appear conclusory. Scholars and judges have roundly criticized this doctrine, but no solution has emerged. We developed and piloted an unbiased and transparent method for making harmless error determinations, using randomized experiments with simulated jurors. To pilot this method on three real cases, we recruited 489 human subjects to participate as mock jurors reviewing trial vignettes that we manipulated into conditions with and without the errors. Subjects were blinded to the purpose of the study and to the first trial’s outcome. By comparing verdict rates in the error and no-error conditions, we estimated whether the error was harmful.
We found a high degree of correspondence between the assessments of real judges and our experimental method, which could be taken as a validation of the method and reassurance that it would not cause a radical change in the rates at which new trials are granted. Still, across the thousands of cases in which harmless error determinations are made each year, the empirical method may be more reliable since it avoids known biases. The transparency of our method may also lend greater legitimacy to harmlessness determinations. If such a method is used as a tool for litigants in real cases, courts will be called upon to establish procedures for taking such evidence and then draw lines to specify how much prejudice is too much, while also being sensitive to the limitations of statistical power. Our study is most useful as proof of concept for a new method to improv
Notes on Unplanned Coauthorship
Get PDFUnplanned coauthorship refers to the process by which contributors to a creative work are treated by copyright law as coauthors of the work based entirely on their observable behavior during its creation. The process entails a court imputing the status of coauthors to the parties ex post, usually during a claim for copyright infringement. For years now, courts and scholars have struggled to identify a coherent rationale for unplanned coauthorship and situate it within copyright\u27s set of goals and objectives. This Article offers a novel framework for understanding the rules of unplanned coauthorship using insights from theories of shared intentionality. Unplanned coauthorship enables courts to balance copyright\u27s commitment to authorial autonomy and individual ownership against the demands of cooperation, collaboration, and information sharing that the creative process invariably entails. Through these rules, copyright law recognizes that certain forms of creativity depend entirely on mechanisms of collaboration for their continuing existence. In such instances of collaborative creativity, the very process of collaboration provides creators with additional and independent reasons for their creative endeavor, a motivation referred to as the collaborative impulse. Characteristic of all joint activities undertaken with a shared intention, the collaborative impluse derives from a motivational commitment to the joint task that collaborating creators develop, causing them to pay equal attention to both the means and the ends of their creativity. The Article shows how the rules of unplanned coauthorship allow copyright law to nurture these domains of collaborative creativity by protecting the collaborative impulse and simultaneously rendering it fully compatible with copyright\u27s utilitarian goal of promoting creativity through exclusive rights
Book Review: Fact and Fiction: The Hanging Judge by Michael Ponsor
No full textThis essay reviews the debut novel by senior federal judge Michael Ponsor, a tale of the first death penalty case to occur in Massachusetts in more than 50 years
Language Disenfranchisement in Juries: A Call for Constitutional Remediation
Get PDFApproximately thirteen million U.S. citizens, mostly Latinos and other people of color, are denied the right to serve on juries due to English language requirements and despite the possibility (and centuries-old tradition) of juror language accommodation. This exclusion results in the underrepresentation of racial minorities on juries and has a detrimental impact on criminal defendants, the perceived legitimacy of the justice system, and citizen participation in democracy. Yet, it has been virtually ignored. This Article examines the constitutionality of juror language requirements, focusing primarily on equal protection and the fair cross section requirement of the Sixth Amendment. Finding the existing juridical framework to be wanting, this Article introduces Critical Originalism — a melding of antisubordination deconstruction principles of Critical Race Theory with the interpretive methodology of Originalism Theory — as a new method of ascertaining and capturing the discriminatory intent behind a statute or procedural rule
Challenge and Response in the Indus Basin
No full textThe authors examine the complex history of the development of the Indus Basin and the challenges faced by Pakistan during the evolution of the Indus Basin Irrigation System and the country\u27s responses to date. The Indus river system must meet the multiple needs of agriculture, energy and flood security. Pakistan\u27s constitutional structure, in which the federation shares overall responsibility for the operation of the Indus with the provinces, poses unique management and implementation challenges. What are the institutional arrangements Pakistan needs to address the challenges to the Indus Waters Treaty it signed with India in 1960? How is the country going to regulate the use of over-abstraction in the basin with the increased reliance on groundwater to maintain agricultural productivity? What are the institutional mechanisms in place to manage increased river flow variations from glacial melt as a result of climate change and for coping with devastating floods? At the same time, is the country maintaining adequate environmental flows to its delta? Provincial mistrust and a lack of institutional capacity underpins the history of the Indus in Pakistan with the Interprovincial Water Accord 1991 serving as a ray of hope on which to build a new institutional architecture of cooperation
Constitutional Exaptation, Political Dysfunction, and the Recess Appointments Clause
Get PDFThe so-called Recess Appointments Clause of the Constitution provides that: “The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.”1 As of only a few years ago, I considered this clause so minor and quirky that I included it in a book about ten of the Constitution’s “oddest” clauses, right alongside such clearly weird provisions as the Title of Nobility Clause and the Third Amendment.2 Though I recognized that the Recess Appointments Clause was probably the least odd of all the clauses in the book in the sense that it has in fact played an important role over the course of the nation’s history, I still felt that it had received such little attention in the courts and among commentators that it would hardly be unreasonable to include it. After all, at the time, I could only find three law review articles that were devoted to discussing its history and meaning.3 The Recess Appointments Clause has become a lot less obscure, however, since January 2013, when the D.C. Circuit invalidated President Obama’s recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in Noel Canning v. NLRB (and, by implication, his more controversial appointment of Richard Cordray to the Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau).4 In the wake of the D.C. Circuit’s decision in Canning, still at this writing awaiting a decision by the Supreme Court, nearly every constitutional law scholar in the United States has written an article about the clause.