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Peak Wokeness in Legal Scholarship: An Empirical Analysis of Recent Trends in Progressive Topics
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AlphaFold 3, AI, Antibody Patents, the Future of Broad Pharmaceutical Patent Claims, and Drug Development
No full textArtificial intelligence (AI) will have an enormous impact both on pharmaceutical development and patent protection, particularly for antibody therapeutics. In Amgen Inc. v. Sanofi, the U.S. Supreme Court limited the scope of Amgen’s therapeutic antibody patent to only those antibodies that were specifically described in Amgen’s patent application and that had been shown to bind to a particular region of the target antigen, blocking the activity of the antigen that caused disease. The reason for this limitation was the patent requirement of enablement: that potentially millions of antibodies could be generated to the target antigen but that not all would bind in a way that produced the therapeutic effect. The Court concluded that Amgen’s patent had not enabled other scientists to produce antibodies with the desired activity without “undue” experimentation, concluding a decades-long shift in their caselaw limiting the permissible scope of monoclonal antibody patents. Our primary conclusion is that artificial intelligence has the power to overcome the problem of enablement that currently limits the scope of antibody patents. We also conclude that the rapid pace of improvement in AI is likely to bring about significant changes in pharmaceutical patents generally, with the potential to transform the future of drug development and the pharmaceutical industry
(Non)police Brutality
No full textLocal governments increasingly rely on unarmed, nonpolice experts to provide public safety services. In response to demands to reduce police violence, many municipalities have empowered paramedics, mental health counselors, social workers, and homeless outreach personnel, to triage health and safety issues without police involvement. Pilot programs reallocating police funds to these alternate responders appear to reduce arrest rates and rates of police violence. But they have not eliminated acts of violence committed by these nonpolice actors themselves. Shocking stories of paramedics chemically sedating motionless patients to death, social workers assaulting clients, and homelessness response units brutally dispersing unhoused persons after destroying their homes highlight the continued risks to vulnerable individuals interfacing with public safety personnel.
This Article provides the first sustained treatment of what I call “nonpolice brutality,” evaluates why most violent nonpolice actors operate free from constitutional restraints, and charts the troubling implications for marginalized communities depending on these responders. While the Fourth Amendment’s excessive force jurisprudence governs most police violence as a potential “unreasonable seizure,” courts are reluctant to apply the same excessive force rules to nonpolice actors outside criminal investigative contexts. Moreover, the Supreme Court’s narrow definition of “seizure” excludes brutal acts designed to disperse rather than detain individuals, a particularly relevant loophole in the homeless rights context. And residual protections from government violence under the Due Process Clause virtually never apply in nonpolice public safety cases, because any such violence fails to “shock the contemporary conscience” of judges removed from the insecurity of daily life on the margins of society’s fragile social welfare system. The Article concludes with recommendations for jurisprudential reform grounded in the text, purpose, and design of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments
Generative Contracts
No full textThis Article examines how consumers can use generative artificial intelligence to write their own contracts. Popularized by “chatbots” such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, generative AI is a form of artificial intelligence that uses statistical models trained on massive amounts of data to generate human-like content such as text, images, music, and more. Generative AI is already being integrated into the practice of law and the legal profession. In the context of contracting and transactional law, most generative AI tools are focused on reviewing and managing large volumes of business contracts. Thus far, little attention has been given to using generative AI to create entire contracts from scratch. This Article aims to fill this gap by exploring the use of “generative contracts”: contracts that are written entirely by a generative AI system based on prompts from the user. For example, a user could ask a generative AI model to, “Write me a contract to sell my used car.” The Article uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 to generate drafts of a wide range of contracts from an employment agreement to a residential lease to a bill of sale. While relatively simple, the contracts written by GPT-4 are functional and enforceable. These results suggest that generative contracts present an opportunity to improve access to justice for consumers who are currently underserved by the legal system. To examine how consumers might use generative contracts in practice, the Article engages in a proof-of-concept case study of two hypothetical consumers who use GPT-4 to write and modify their own car sale contract. Drawing on this case study, the Article analyzes the implications of generative contracts for consumers, lawyers, and the practice of law. While generative AI holds great promise for consumers and access to justice, it threatens to disrupt the legal profession and poses numerous technological, privacy, and regulatory challenges. The Article maps the benefits and risks of generative contracts as the world approaches a future of automated contracting
The Economic Cost of Exclusion: How Trump\u27s Second-Term Immigration Policies Threaten California\u27s Economy
No full textThe First Thing We Do is Kill All the Lawsuits
Full text linkAs insurance premiums spike across the Nation, insurers are (yet again) pointing the finger at lawyers and lawsuits as an explanation. This Article offers new and important data on whether, in fact, currently there is a crisis of litigation in the United States. Neither the assertion of a litigation crisis, nor legislatures adopting systemic reform in response to the perception of one, is anything new. For almost two hundred years, there have been recurring cycles of complaints about lawyers, lawsuits, and their impact on society. Yet each time independent researchers have looked at the assertion, they have found the data wanting. Nonetheless, the current call from insurance companies and their lobbyists is that “social inflation” is somehow worse, different, and again fast driving the unaffordability and unavailability of insurance. Taking advantage of deeper data than ever before available, this Article jumps into a task largely not undertaken by academics for at least a decade, again seeking empirical evidence of a litigation crisis. This Article asks: considering the lack of evidence before, what’s new? In addressing this question, this Article looks at 25+ year trends to determine whether more lawsuits are being filed, defendants are losing with greater frequency, mean and median awards are growing, more frivolous cases are being filed (or winning), and if the cost of litigation is having a measurable impact on the cost of insurance. In other words, is there a litigation crisis