5033 research outputs found
Sort by
A Guide for Certifying Agencies: MGL 258F Certification for Victims of Violent Crime and Human Trafficking
Get PDFThis guide provides information to certifying agencies about the new law, M.G.L. 258F Certification for Victims of Violent Crime and Human Trafficking, which went into effect on July 1, 2021. The law provides victims of violent crime and human trafficking equal access to justice throughout the Commonwealth and establishes transparent and consistent processes for victims seeking certifications from law enforcement agencies
Chapter 7: Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc., 569 U.S. 576 (2013)
No full textJUSTICE KALI MURRAY, WITH WHOM JUSTICE ERIKA GEORGE JOINS, CONCURRING IN PART AND DISSENTING IN PART
The public has a substantial interest in having a functional and equitable patent system. An invalid patent, like an invalid statute, can have significant effects on a range of social interests. Those interested in a properly functioning patent system are many and varied: scientists, researchers, and engineers creating advances in technology; manufacturers and designers implementing and vending these advances in the marketplace; consumers putting these inventions and discoveries to their own productive use; patients who may need access to healthcare advances generated by patents; and individuals whose genetic information may serve as the basic elements of patentable research. Just as these stakeholders benefit from a properly functioning patent system, they can suffer injury from invalid patents. And injury calls upon the courts to make the injured whole. See, e.g., Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137, 163 (1803)
A Comparative Study of Dark Patterns Across Mobile and Web Modalities
Get PDFDark patterns are user interface elements that can influence a person\u27s behavior against their intentions or best interests. Prior work identified these patterns in websites and mobile apps, but little is known about how the design of platforms might impact dark pattern manifestations and related human vulnerabilities. In this paper, we conduct a comparative study of mobile application, mobile browser, and web browser versions of 105 popular services to investigate variations in dark patterns across modalities. We perform manual tests, identify dark patterns in each service, and examine how they persist or differ by modality. Our findings show that while services can employ some dark patterns equally across modalities, many dark patterns vary between platforms, and that these differences saddle people with inconsistent experiences of autonomy, privacy, and control. We conclude by discussing broader implications for policymakers and practitioners, and provide suggestions for furthering dark patterns research
A Tribute to Robert (“Bob”) G. Burdick: A Man of Vision and Light
Get PDFOne of Bob’s former students said it best: “Bob was the lawyer I wanted to be. He was the person I wanted to be.”1 Bob was also the mentor, teacher, and innovator I aspired to be. For many marginalized clients, Bob brought the change they needed; the change justice required. He embodied hope—he saw the light and strove to enable others to share in its glow
Deficit Frame Dangers
Get PDFCivil rights advocates have long viewed litigation as an essential, if insufficient, catalyst of social change. In part, it is. But in critical respects that remain underexplored in legal scholarship, civil rights litigation can hinder short- and long-term projects of racial justice.Specifically, certain civil rights doctrines reward plaintiffs for emphasizing community deficits—or what I term a “deficit frame.” Legal doctrine, in other words, invites legal narratives that track, activate, and reinforce pernicious racial stereotypes. This dynamic, even in the context of well-intended litigation, risks entrenching conditions that drive racial inequality—including the conditions that litigation is often intended to address. To concretize the theory, this Article explores how deficit frames can influence the behavior of four key constituencies who impact—and often undermine—the pursuit of educational equality
Litigation as Education: The Role of Public Health to Prevent Weaponizing Second Amendment Rights
Get PDFTobacco litigation was unquestionably successful, but it is dangerous to expect that it can be easily duplicated. An unrealistic reliance on litigation as a regulatory measure can blind public health advocates to other mechanisms of change. And that includes litigation as a means of enabling actual regulation. Firearms and the gun violence epidemic provides a useful case study. The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) essentially bars litigation as a regulatory tool for firearms. This legislation means every time someone pulls the trigger, they become the party to blame. Soto v. Bushmaster Firearms presents a rare exception based on wrongful marketing, yet, even this case holds most of its promise in the potential for discovery.But public health litigation for firearms is by no means a lost cause. Rather than focusing on litigation liability, public health can play an essential role in litigation around constitutionality of regulations. There are Second Amendment challenges at every level of the judiciary. And how those cases are evaluated will have a dramatic impact on the available options for tackling gun violence moving forward. Yet, public health’s role in the constitutional interpretation of firearm regulations has been relatively minor. The judiciary\u27s ability to understand public health principles, public health law, and gun violence as a public health problem could have a significant influence over what direction these cases go. Consequently, the public health community must play a larger role in these cases for any chance at successfully stemming growing tide of gun violence
Cyber Mobs, Disinformation, and Death Videos: The Internet As It Is (And As It Should Be)
Get PDFFiction and visual representations can alter our understanding of human experiences and struggles. They help us understand human frailties and suffering in a visceral way. Nick Drnaso’s graphic novel Sabrina does that in spades. In Sabrina, a woman is murdered by a misogynist, and a video of her execution is leaked. Conspiracy theorists deem her murder a hoax. A cyber mob smears the woman’s loved ones as crisis actors, posts death threats, and spreads their personal information. The attacks continue until a shooting massacre redirects the cyber mob’s wrath to other mourners. Sabrina captures the breathtaking velocity of disinformation online and the rapid escalation to terroristic threats./= / \u3e/= / \u3eEvery day, people are radicalized online to wreak havoc and violence. On August 3, 2019, in El Paso, Texas, a twenty-one-year old man posted a racist manifesto on 8chan and then walked into a Wal Mart with a powerful rifle, killing 20 people and injuring many others. The killer trafficked in and engaged with others in hateful conspiracy theories. /= / \u3e/= / \u3eDrnaso invites a conversation about cyber mobs, conspiracy theories, and death videos and the norms, attitudes, and laws enabling them. Right now, it is cheap and easy to wreak havoc online and for that havoc to go viral. Platforms act rationally — some might say responsibly to their shareholders — when they tolerate abuse that earns them advertising revenue and costs them nothing in legal liability. Combatting cyber-mob attacks must be a priority. Law should raise the cost of cyber-mob attacks. It is time for tech companies to redress some of the negative externalities of their business model. Platforms should not enjoy immunity from liability for user-generated content unless they have earned that immunity with reasonable content moderation practices. Education should play a role as well. As digital citizens, we need to do better
State Handgun Purchase Age Minimums in the US and Adolescent Suicide Rates:
Get PDFObjective To evaluate the association between US state policies that establish age 18 or 21 years as the minimum purchaser age for the sale of handguns and adolescent suicide rate. Design Regression discontinuity and difference-in-differences analyses. Setting 46 US states without policy changes between 2001 and 2017; Missouri and South Carolina, which lowered the age for handgun sales in 2007 and 2008, respectively; and West Virginia and Wyoming, which increased the age for handgun sales in 2010. Participants Adolescents aged 13 to 20 years(554 461 961 from 2001 to 2017) in the regression discontinuity analysis, and adolescents aged 18 to 20 years (168 934 041 from 2002 to 2014) in the main difference-in-differences analysis. Main outcome measure Suicide rate per 100 000 adolescents. Results In the regression discontinuity analysis, state policies that limited the sale of handguns to those aged 18 or older (relative to 21 or older) were associated with an increase in suicide rate among adolescents aged 18 to 20 years equivalent to 344 additional suicides in each state where they were in place between 2001 and 2017. In the difference-in-differences analysis, state policies that limited the sale of handguns to those aged 21 or older were associated with 1.91 fewer suicides per 100 000 adolescents aged 18 to 20 years (95% confidence interval −3.13 to −0.70, permutation adjusted P=0.025). In the difference-in-differences analysis, there were 1.83 fewer firearm related suicides per 100 000 adolescents (−2.66 to −1.00, permutation adjusted P=0.002), with no association between age 21 handgun sales policies and non-firearm related suicides. Separate event study estimates indicated increases in suicide rates in states that lowered the age of handgun sales, with no association in states that increased the age of handgun sales. Conclusions A clear discontinuity was shown in the suicide rate by age at age 18 in states that limited the sale of handguns to individuals aged 18 or older. State policies to limit the sale of handguns to individuals aged 21 or older were associated with a reduction in suicide rates among adolescents. Increases in suicide rates were observed after states lowered the age of handgun sales, but no effect was found in states that increased the age of handgun sales
In Defense of Breakups: Administering a “Radical” Remedy
Get PDFCalls for breaking up monopolies—especially Amazon, Facebook, and Google—have largely focused on proving that past acquisitions of companies like Whole Foods, Instagram, and YouTube were anticompetitive. But scholars have paid insufficient attention to another major obstacle that also explains why the government in recent decades has not broken up a single large company. After establishing that an anticompetitive merger or other act has occurred, there is great skepticism of breakups as a remedy. Judges, scholars, and regulators see a breakup as extreme, frequently comparing the remedy to trying to “unscramble eggs.” They doubt the government’s competence in executing such a difficult task, pointing to decision-making flaws dating back to the breakups of Standard Oil in 1911 and AT&T in 1984. Even many scholars calling for more vigorous antitrust enforcement recommend alternative remedies. This Article asserts that the pervasive hesitancy about administering breakups renders antitrust impotent in the face of monopolies—too often a statutory right without a remedy. More importantly, the Article challenges the perception of breakups as unadministrable. The intellectual foundations for the anti-breakup stance are weak, relying on outdated, anecdotal evidence. Moreover, antitrust needs a methodological shift toward paying greater attention to the breakup insights yielded by other disciplines. In particular, business scholars have studied how the world’s leading companies regularly break themselves up voluntarily. Additionally, administrative law scholarship has observed a broader evolution toward collaborative regulation that shows how the much-maligned historical approaches to antitrust remedies could be greatly improved by relying more on the business sector in designing and implementing breakups. In other words, insights from outside of antitrust address many critiques of breakups and show how that remedy is far from radical and messy. Antitrust observers should thus abandon the worldview that compares breaking up prior companies to unscrambling eggs. Or at a minimum they should recognize that scrambled eggs, once cooked, are regularly divided into smaller portions. A greater willingness to do the same to monopolies in the post-merger context and beyond would bring regulators more in line with the business sector, which sees divestitures as a routine part of effective governance
Administrative Law: Cases and Materials, 8th ed.
Get PDFAdministrative Law: Cases and Materials is the product of a longstanding collaboration by a distinguished group of authors, each with extensive experience in the teaching, scholarship, and practice of administrative law. The Eighth Edition preserves the book’s distinctive features of functional organization and extensive use of case studies, with no sacrifice in doctrinal comprehensiveness or currency. By organizing over half of the book under the generic administrative functions of policymaking, adjudication, enforcement, and licensing, the book illuminates the common features of diverse administrative practices and the interconnection of otherwise disparate doctrines. Scattered throughout the book, case studies present leading judicial decisions in their political, legal, institutional, and technical context, thereby providing the reader with a much fuller sense of the reality of administrative practice and the important policy implications of seemingly technical legal doctrines. At the same time, the Eighth Edition fully captures the headline-grabbing nature of federal administrative practice in today’s politically divided world.https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/books/1139/thumbnail.jp