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The Role of Public Health Laws in Combating Plastic Pollution in Nigeria: Lessons from Other selected Jurisdictions
Get PDFArtificial Intelligence Inventions & Patent Disclosure
Get PDFArtificial intelligence (“AI”) has attracted significant attention and has imposed challenges for society. Yet surprisingly, scholars have paid little attention to the impediments AI imposes on patent law’s disclosure function from the lenses of theory and policy. Patents are conditioned on inventors describing their inventions, but the inner workings and the use of AI in the inventive process are not properly understood or are largely unknown. The lack of transparency of the parameters of the AI inventive process or the use of AI makes it difficult to enable a future use of AI to achieve the same end state. While patent law’s enablement doctrine focuses on the particular result of the invention process, in contrast, this Article suggests that AI presents a lack of transparency and difficulty in replication that profoundly and fundamentally challenge disclosure theory in patent law. A reasonable onlooker or a patent examiner may find it difficult to explain the inner workings of AI. But even more pressing is a non-detection problem—an overall lack of disclosure of unidentified AI inventions, or knowing whether the particular end state was produced by the use of AI.
The complexities of AI require enhancing the disclosure requirement since the peculiar characteristics of the end state cannot be described by the inventive process that produced it. This Article introduces a taxonomy of AI and argues that an enhanced AI patent disclosure requirement mitigates concerns surrounding the explainability of AI-based tools and the inherent inscrutability of AI-generated output. Such emphasis of patent disclosure for AI may steer some inventors toward trade secrecy and push others to seek patent protection against would-be patent infringers despite added ex ante costs and efforts. Utilitarian and Lockean theories suggest justifications for enhanced AI patent disclosure while recognizing some objections. Turning to the prescriptive, this Article proposes and assesses, as means for achieving enhanced disclosure, a variety of disclosure-specific incentives and data deposits for AI. It concludes by offering insights for innovation and for a future empirical study to verify its theoretical underpinnings
National Cybersecurity Innovation
Get PDFNational cybersecurity plays a crucial role in protecting our critical infrastructure, such as telecommunication networks, the electricity grid, and even financial transactions. Most discussions about promoting national cybersecurity focus on governance structures, international relations, and political science. In contrast, this Article proposes a different agenda and one that promotes the use of innovation mechanisms for technological advancement. By promoting inducements for technological developments, such innovation mechanisms encourage the advancement of national cybersecurity solutions. In exploring possible solutions, this Article asks whether the government or markets can provide national cybersecurity innovation. This inquiry is a fragment of a much larger literature on various innovation policy options (including patents, prizes, grants, and research and development tax credits). It requires determining whether national cybersecurity is a public good and an examination of market failure and government failure. Along the way, it draws on a property-liability rules theoretical framework to argue that the patent system’s invention secrecy restrictions and government patent use are ineffective for national cybersecurity innovation. On a normative level, the interface between government intervention and markets presents innovation mechanisms for national cybersecurity. Turning to prescriptions, expansion of prizes should rapidly promote national cybersecurity innovation, and reciprocal public–private research and development interactions should gradually multiply knowledge spillovers
Disgorging Harvey Weinstein\u27s Salary
Get PDFHarvey Weinstein dramatically altered the way that people view sexual harassment in the workplace. While workplace sexual harassment is far from a new phenomenon – with many perpetrators of such harassment (including Weinstein himself) having gotten away with this misbehavior for decades – the exposure of Weinstein’s misdeeds opened the floodgates, leading countless women from a variety of work environments to share their own experiences with sexual harassment at work. As the #MeToo movement has continued to occupy the headlines, workplace harassment has begun to seem as ubiquitous as it is distressing.
This intensified spotlight on sexual harassment has exposed a persistent frustration among academics, the media and members of the public, as society puzzles over what can be done to eliminate sexual misbehavior at work. Robust research indicates that conventional mechanisms for addressing sexual harassment, like carefully worded policies or mandatory training sessions, fail to root out perpetrators like Weinstein. Instead, research demonstrates that only significant cultural change in the workplace can reduce instances of this sexual misconduct. This Article explores a new – and potentially radical – way of instilling such cultural change.
This Article describes a little known but powerful Remedies principle known as the Faithless Servant Doctrine, which allows for the disgorgement of compensation from employees who breach their fiduciary duties to their employers. When employees breach their fiduciary duties by creating or perpetuating a culture of workplace harassment, the Faithless Servant Doctrine could provide companies with a powerful tool to demonstrate that this sexual misconduct negates any value that a misbehaving employee otherwise brings to the workplace. This Article questions whether using compensation disgorgement to hit wrongdoers where it hurts – in their wallets – finally could foster the cultural shift that is necessary to decrease sexual harassment at work
Judicial Independence Sidelined: Just One More Symptom of an Immigration Court System Reeling
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Women Law Deans, Gender Sidelining, and Presumptions of Incompetence
Get PDFDiscussions of presumptions of incompetence and gender sidelining all address challenges that women, especially women of color, face in leadership roles. This Article explores these topics in the context of law deans.
This Article starts with updated data on the number of women law deans, including women of color, and demonstrates increased numbers of both women and women of color in deanships. It then shifts to plausible explanations for this growth: some optimistic and some more skeptical. It may be no coincidence that as the job became less desirable, women were appointed in greater numbers.
Next, this Article provides narrative descriptions of women’s experiences in leadership, including experiences unique to women of color, such as common stories of presumptions of incompetence, and gender sidelining. This Part also dissects women deans’ experiences with presumptions of incompetence and gender sidelining, and explores relationship and family patterns revealed by survey responses. It also suggests potential trends and truths.
The next Part of this Article develops ideas on how to continue increasing the number of women law deans and provide them support for success
Paper Terrorists: Independence Movements and the Terrorism Bar
Get PDFThis Article explores the application of the terrorism bar in immigration law to noncitizens who have participated in an independence movement. It proposes a uniform standard that immigration adjudicators can use to determine whether a foreign entity is a state in order to promote accurate applications of the terrorism bar. The terrorism bar in the Immigration and Nationality Act is broad — it can bar most forms of immigration relief, including asylum, and reaches far beyond ordinary definitions of terrorism. For example, the terrorism bar can block immigration relief for noncitizens who nonviolently supported a militia fighting for independence against a repressive state or who received military-type training from such an organization. The terrorism bar applies even if that militia is supported by the United States. The bar can also ensnare a noncitizen’s spouse and children who have not themselves participated in those activities.
Especially in light of its far reach and harsh consequences, it is of the utmost importance to accurately apply the bar, which can be challenging for cases on the margins. One such area is the application of the bar to noncitizens who have supported independence movements leading to the creation of new states, which are situations that often produce large numbers of asylum seekers and refugees. The complexity arises because the terrorism bar requires unlawful conduct, but participation in and support of a state’s armed forces are not unlawful. During an independence movement, a new state can emerge, and support of its armed forces is not unlawful even though hostilities may continue with the state from which it seceded. Adjudicators need to be able to determine when an entity achieved statehood because it could mean the difference between a noncitizen participating in unlawful rebellion, which could trigger the terrorism bar, and supporting the armed forces of a state, which would not. However, there is currently no uniform framework for analyzing questions of statehood in the context of the terrorism bar.
Drawing from international law and domestic law, this Article proposes a standard that immigration adjudicators can use to assess questions of statehood to avoid the creation of “paper terrorists” — noncitizens who have participated in independence movements and are mistakenly labeled as terrorists under the Immigration and Nationality Act. This proposal stems from, and is consistent with, the statutory language of the Immigration and Nationality Act, and therefore does not require any legislative action. The proposed standard encourages immigration adjudicators to give full effect to the statutory language to promote more accurate applications of the terrorism bar