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Psychedelic Drugs & The Prior Art Problem
Get PDFFor the first time since the War on Drugs began in the 1970s, researchers have returned to the promise of psychedelic drugs for treating the growing mental health crisis in the United States. As research into psychedelic drugs as a conventional treatment method for mental health conditions grows, so does the number of filings at the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office for psychedelic-related patents. But the decades-long lapse in the development of psychedelic drugs creates the risk that low-quality psychedelic patents will issue, giving limited monopolies to companies that have not truly innovated in the psychedelic space. In this Note, I discuss two psychedelic drugs at the forefront of current research, examine the importance of patents in the psychedelic field, and introduce the “prior art problem” resulting from the lack of psychedelic prior art. To combat this problem, I then propose the creation of a database comprised of recreational psychedelic information, incentivized through government subsidies and immunity from prosecution
Why Judges Should Use 18 U.S.C. § 3553 to Assess Prison Sentences Qualitatively in the Context of Collateral Relief
No full textFair’s Fair: How Public Benefit Considerations in the Fair Use Doctrine Can Patch Bias in Artificial Intelligence Systems
Get PDFThe impact of artificial intelligence (AI) expands relentlessly despite well documented examples of bias in AI systems, from facial recognition failing to differentiate between darker-skinned faces to hiring tools discriminating against female candidates. These biases can be introduced to AI systems in a variety of ways; however, a major source of bias is found in training datasets, the collection of images, text, audio, or information used to build and train AI systems. This Article first grapples with the pressure copyright law exerts on AI developers and researchers to use biased training data to build algorithms, focusing on the potential risk of copyright infringement. Second, it examines how the fair use doctrine, particularly its public benefit consideration, can be applied to AI systems and begin to address the algorithmic bias problem afflicting many of today’s systems. Ultimately, this Article concludes that the social utility and human rights benefits of diversifying AI training data justifies the fair use of copyrighted works
The Racialized History of Vice Policing
Get PDFVice policing targets the consumption and commercialization of certain pleasures that have been criminalized in the United States—such as the purchase of narcotics and sexual services. One might assume that vice policing is concerned with eliminating these vices. However, in reality, this form of policing has not been centered on protecting and preserving the moral integrity of the policed communities by eradicating vice. Instead, the history of vice policing provides an example of the racialized nature of policing in the United States. Vice policing has been focused on (1) maintaining racial segregation, (2) containing vice in marginalized communities, and (3) facilitating the surveillance of these communities. This Article adopts an abolitionist methodology to evaluate vice policing and introduces three principles that animate abolitionist organizing and thought: the principles of legacy, futility, and possibility. This Article introduces this framework for understanding abolition, which will be more deeply examined in future work. It applies two of these principles—legacy and futility—to evaluate the racialized history of vice policing in the United States. The first principle, legacy, invites us to center an institution’s history in the maintenance of white supremacy when evaluating that institution’s continued existence in modern society. The second principle, futility, encourages us to abandon futile attempts to resuscitate morally bankrupt institutions. This Article applies the legacy and futility principles to demonstrate how the very core of vice policing is about maintaining white supremacy.
In many cities in the United States, police deliberately pushed vice into racially segregated Black neighborhoods and contributed to a geography of vice that reinforced the racial hierarchy. This policing protected property interests in white neighborhoods while allowing vice to continue to exist within these cities. Vice policing maintained the property interests of white communities by ensuring their property values did not decrease because of visible, and impossible to fully eradicate, crimes. As such, the policing of vice was a mechanism for maintaining racial segregation and preserving white property. It was a form of redline policing. Liberals who critique police and prison abolition as too radical often ignore this history (or are unfamiliar with it). While these liberal reformers believe we should preserve the good parts of policing, this Article argues that racialized vice policing has left very little good to preserve. In other words, the bad parts of vice policing are core to the way policing occurs and are part of its legacy (and present). This Article illustrates how this policing was critical to creating and then maintaining Black communities as sites of vice and visible crime. Given this history, the abolitionist demand to abandon futile efforts to reform violent institutions invites us to take this history seriously and look beyond police to address community harm in this area
Mobilizable Labor Law
Get PDFIn the history of new labor localism, city-level living wage ordinances—emerging in the 1990s with Los Angeles leading the way—have generally been understood as a second-best, limited antipoverty device designed to raise wage floors, with only indirect effects on organized labor. Drawing upon original archival materials, this Article offers an alternative reading of the history of the living wage in Los Angeles, showing how it was designed and operationalized as a proactive tool to rebuild union density and reshape city politics. Doing so makes four key contributions. First, the Article theorizes and empirically examines the living wage as a pioneering form of mobilizable labor law: a local legal reform with pro-labor potential unlocked through collective action by unions, in this case, enabling union organizing by addressing regulatory weaknesses in the National Labor Relations Act. Second, the Article deepens labor history by reframing the LA living wage movement as a key inflection point connecting the seminal Justice for Janitors campaign, considered the launching pad for new labor efforts to organize low-wage immigrant workers, to new labor organizing building toward the Fight for $15. Third, contrary to the standard critique of lawyers demobilizing movements through legalization, the LA campaign reveals the creative role of lawyers behind the scenes in developing new understandings of labor law that established conditions of possibility for successful union organizing. Finally, by illuminating how labor actors mapped local government power to identify opportunities for mobilization—particularly in publicly held assets such as airports—the Article sheds new light on the dynamic relation between social movements and local government. Specifically, in the case of labor, strategic localism has catalyzed an iterative cycle of union organizing by helping build a power base for organized labor in big cities and promoting diffusion of pro-labor policymaking across political boundaries. Recovering this history of the living wage serves as a means to unlock law’s transformative potential in labor campaigns that rise to meet contemporary challenges of economic and racial inequality
Policing Pregnancy Crimes
Get PDFThe Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization held that there is no right to abortion healthcare under the United States Constitution. This Essay details how states prosecuted pregnant people for pregnancy behaviors and speculative fetal harms prior to the Dobbs decision. In this connection, it also identifies two, related post-Dobbs concerns: (1) that states will ramp up their policing of pregnancy behaviors and (2) that prosecutors will attempt to substantiate these charges by relying on invalid scientific evidence. This Essay examines the faulty forensic science that states have used to support fetal harm allegations and reminds defense attorneys of their obligation to challenge junk science in the courtroom
Layered Fiduciaries in the Information Age
Get PDFTechnology companies such as Facebook have long been criticized for abusing customers’ personal information and monetizing user data in a manner contrary to customer expectations. Some commentators suggest fiduciary law could be used to restrict how these companies use their customers’ data.1 Under this framework, a new member of the fiduciary family called the “information fiduciary” was born. The concept of an information fiduciary is that a company providing network services to “collect, analyze, use, sell, and distribute personal information” owes customers and end-users a fiduciary duty to use the collected data to promote their interests, thereby assuming fiduciary liability if it misuses or misappropriates customer data.2 Although the possibility of an information fiduciary has generated significant attention, neither questions about the scope of the information fiduciary’s duty of care nor whether corporate law’s fiduciary duties are compatible with the information fiduciary duty have been satisfactorily answered.
In 2021, Facebook was renamed Meta Platforms, Inc., to expand business related to the Metaverse,3 which is expected to bring about many new digital products. The establishment and development of the information fiduciary duty will help prepare the legal framework for this new era of digitization. This Article proposes a model to implement the information fiduciary’s duty of loyalty and duty of care to end-users in today’s information age by imposing these duties on Data Protection Officers (DPOs). First, this Article sketches the contours of information fiduciary duties on DPOs, examines how these duties can be structured, and clarifies how they interact with the duties owed by directors to the company. Second, this paper addresses the use of layered fiduciaries to alleviate the potential conflict caused by the information fiduciary duty. Third, this Article discusses in detail how the fiduciary duties imposed by Delaware corporate law can be applied to the field of digital privacy and consumer data. Directors’ duties of care and loyalty in corporate law have developed over decades to form a useful system that is applicable in developing the information fiduciary duty. Implementing the information fiduciary duty can benefit from and be partially guided by existing law, like the director’s duty to inform under the duty of care and the duty to act in the best interests of the company under the duty of loyalty. Lastly, this Article explores how the information fiduciary duty can efficiently regulate multinational corporations’ international data transfers, a rarely discussed yet important aspect of world economic development
Volunteer Income Tax Assistance Available to Local Community Members through March 28
Get PDFWith tax season now in full-swing through April 18, a dedicated group of volunteers is making the filing process easier—and cheaper—for many local community members. Local taxpayers with an annual income under $57,000 are eligible for free tax preparation help from students at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law’s Volunteer Income Tax Assistance site on Monday and Tuesday evenings from 6 to 9 p.m. beginning January 30
