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Homography of Inventorship: DABUS and Valuing Inventors
Get PDFOn July 28, 2021, the Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience ( DAB US ) became the first computer to be recognized as a patent inventor. Due to the advocacy of DAB US\u27s inventor, Dr. Stephen Thaler, the world\u27s definition of inventor has finally fractured - dividing patent regimes between recognition of machine inventorship and lack thereof This division has sparked many scholarly conversations about inventorship contribution, but none have discussed the implications of a homographic inventorship.
This Article addresses the implications of international homographic inventorship - where countries have different notions and rules concerning patent inventorship - and the consequences for failing to understand the divergences that could result in patent invalidation. This Article adds to the literature by addressing Thaler\u27s tireless inventorship advocacy, highlighting that Thaler uses his position of privilege to argue for inventorship acknowledgement ofhis machine and simultaneously to relinquish his own inventorship recognition. To emphasize, there is no existing caselaw except the DAB US case where a potential inventor has argued for the acknowledgement of another inventor and simultaneously relinquished their own recognition - whether that unacknowledged inventor was human or not human. Thaler\u27s advocacy amplifies the need for continued conversation regarding closing the patent inventorship gap for women and underrepresented minorities of color, who are too often tokenized and marginalized in STEM and in the patent process.
By bringing the definition of inventor to the forefront, the DAB US case represents more than just a case of Al inventorship: it is a potential gateway to provide language and arguments to frame conversations about inventorship equity. In particular, the unique instance of Thaler\u27s inventorship advocacy for his machine prompts questions about why inventors from privileged positions do not advocate for inventors from historically marginalized backgrounds. Based on a review of patent case law and sociology studies concerning power dynamics and communal recognition, this Article provides recommendations to address this issue and accelerate the stagnant process of achieving inventorship equit
Unraveling the Web of Legal Protection: Race, Police Misconduct, and the Favorable Termination Rule
No full textThe murder of George Floyd raised greater awareness of the pervasiveness of racialized police violence in the United States. Advocates, activists, and concerned policymakers have drawn attention to legal barriers that prevent accountability for police who kill and abuse Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (“BIPOC”), such as qualified immunity. However, the true extent of the legal system’s protections regarding racialized police misconduct remains unrecognized. A key example of this is the favorable termination rule, which many jurisdictions have interpreted as imposing an “indications-of-innocence” standard. This standard, in numerous instances, serves as a procedural loophole that prevents civil rights redress against police officers who bring false criminal charges. Since there are many well documented examples of police targeting BIPOC with false charges, the indications-of-innocence standard has a racist impact. This essay examines how the indications-of-innocence standard serves as one thread in a vast invisible web of legal protections that enables racialized police misconduct
Vesting
Get PDFThe executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. The Executive Vesting Clause is one of three originalist pillars for the unitary executive theory, the idea that the President possesses executive powers like removal without congressional limitations (that is, the powers are indefeasible). An underlying assumption is that vest connotes a formalist approach to separation of powers rather than a more functional system of Madisonian checks and balances. Assumptions about vesting for official powers are likely the result of semantic drift from property rights and ahistoric projections back from the later Marshall Court doctrine of vested rights.
This Article offers a close textual reading of the word vesting and an examination of its eighteenth-century usage and context, with the first survey of available dictionaries (from 1637 to 1846), colonial charters and state constitutions, the Constitutional Convention, and Ratification debates. Dictionaries defined vest in terms of basic landed property rights, without reference to exclusivity or indefeasibility, and rarely with any reference to offices or powers. Other legal documents and digital collections of the Founders\u27 papers indicate a range of usage, from fully vested to simply vested to partly vested, so that the word vesting by itself would signify less completeness. Meanwhile, words used in the Constitution or by the Framers to convey exclusivity or indefeasibility (for example, all, exclusive, sole, alone, or indefeasible ) are missing from the Executive Vesting Clause. The ordinary meaning of vesting was most likely a simple grant of powers without signifying the impermissibility of legislative conditions such as good-cause requirements for removals, undermining the unitary theory\u27s originalist basis. On the other hand, the all in the Legislative Vesting Clause may be more legally meaningful for nondelegation
The Epistemology of Second Best
Get PDFSecond best theory “holds that where it is not possible to satisfy all the conditions necessary for a[] . . . system to reach an overall optimum, it is not generally desirable to satisfy as many of those conditions as possible.” Adrian Vermeule, Foreword: System Effects and the Constitution, 123 HARV. L. REV. 4, 17 (2009). In other words, if you are not moving all the way to the ideal state of affairs, it is unclear whether partial moves that seem to go in the direction of the ideal make the world “better” or “worse” – with “better” or “worse” defined by the same criteria, whatever they may be, that defined your ideal. This article shows how second best theory is even more important and even more (for want of a better word) subversive than its most familiar applications suggest. Second best considerations lurk at the core of all processes of acquiring or pursuing knowledge, including but not at all limited to legal knowledge. Put simply, even assuming away the costs of acquiring and processing new information, more knowledge will not necessarily lead to better decisions than will less knowledge, with “better” meaning “more likely to lead to accomplishment of a defined goal,” whether that goal is pursuing a substantive conception of justice, obtaining an economic equilibrium, or acquiring truth. The capacity of additional information to lead to better decisions depends on (1) the shape of the path towards full or ideal knowledge. (2) one’s location on that path at a particular moment of decision, and (3) the likelihood that one will be able to follow that path to its end. All three of these factors are highly contingent and often difficult, and perhaps impossible, to ascertain. The bottom line is that knowing less can lead to better decisions than knowing more. That will not always be the case. But it might sometimes be the case. There is an optimum amount of knowledge for any particular decision, and supra-optimal knowledge can be just as bad, from the standpoint of decisional accuracy, as sub-optimal knowledge. This has potential implications for, among other things, the role of expertise in administrative law and evidence law
Introduction to Law and Legal Skills 2nd Ed
No full textThis book provides material for university lecturers in Southern Africa to deliver an introductory law course that teaches students about the law and legal system while engaging them in learning and practicing legal skills.https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/books/1368/thumbnail.jp
Threat and Emotions: Mobilizing and Attitudinal Outcomes of a Ballistic Missile Scare
Get PDFThis study examines the false ballistic missile alert that occurred in Hawaii in 2018, which presented a unique opportunity for assessing the civic and mobilizing outcomes of a threat. In the days that followed the scare, we conducted an online experiment to investigate its effects on willingness to engage in activism and concerns about broader issues. Our results show that emotions serve as an important mechanism for channeling threat experiences into concern about specific causes. Those most emotionally affected by the missile scare in Hawaii thought it more important to engage in activities to control the spread of nuclear weapons, protect the environment, and address climate change, relative to a control group on the mainland. Both the intensity and type of emotion play a role. These results shed light on the role of threats and grievances in shaping concern about social and environmental issues. They also suggest that emotions may serve as a bridge that can connect personal, concrete, lived-experiences to more abstract, complex, or future-oriented issues and grievances
Colorblind Capture
Get PDFWe are facing two converging waves of racial retrenchment. The first, which arose following the Civil Rights Movement, is nearing a legal milestone. This term or the next, the Supreme Court will prohibit affirmative action in higher education. When it does, the Court will cement decades of conservative jurisprudence that has systematically eroded the right to remedy racial inequality.The second wave is more recent but no less significant. Following 2020’s global uprising for racial justice, rightwing forces launched a coordinated assault on antiracism itself. The campaign has enjoyed early success. As one measure, GOP officials have passed, proposed or pre-filed hundreds of bills designed to stymie antiracist discourse, activism, and organizing.To process this moment, scholars have surfaced continuities that bind racial retrenchment past and present. This includes decades of rightwing efforts to deny the relevance of race and racism in post-Jim Crow America. These accounts are not wrong. But they obscure a key variable that has long enabled racial backlash: the Left. Specifically, privileged voices on the Left continue to rehearse colorblind conceptions of race and racism—even when defending race-conscious reform.I term this phenomenon colorblind capture. To capture its ubiquity and impact, I explore decades of affirmative action litigation. This analysis reveals an underappreciated trend. Even as the Left champions affirmative action, the Right sets the terms of debate. This includes the pervasive reflex, on the Left, to defend affirmative action as a “racial preference.” This framing is neither inevitable nor strategic. The Left could, for example, defend race-consciousness as essential antidiscrimination—that is, a modest tool to mitigate existing racial (dis)advantage and, thereby, yield a more individualized, objective, and race-neutral process. But as litigation headed for the Supreme Court reveals, Harvard and UNC continue to rehearse rightwing talking points—even as they defend their own admissions policies.This dynamic does more than compromise the legal case for race-conscious admissions. It also naturalizes within public discourse the notion that seeing race and attending to racism is wrong—the same logic that anchors resurgent efforts to brand antiracism as the new racism. Colorblindness, albeit a creature of the Right, has captured the Left. If left unaddressed, this phenomenon will continue to impede, and could imperil, the long and winding quest for racial justice in America
“She’s Earned This”: Angela Onwuachi-Willig Rejoices in Historic Confirmation
Get PDFAngela Onwuachi-Willig, the dean of Boston University’s School of Law—the first Black woman to be dean of a top-20 law school—is rejoicing. The first Black woman has been confirmed to the US Supreme Court.
Onwuachi-Willig has had Ketanji Brown Jackson’s back from the moment President Biden announced he would nominate the federal judge to the nation’s highest court
LAW Dean’s Letter Urges Confirmation of Biden’s Historic SCOTUS Pick, Ketanji Brown Jackson
Get PDFIn a letter citing Black women’s underrepresentation on the federal bench, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, dean of the BU School of Law, and more than 200 other Black women law deans and professors urged the US Senate on Friday to confirm President Joe Biden’s nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, to the nation’s highest court “swiftly and with bipartisan support.