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Age and Saving Lives in Crisis Standards of Care: A Multicenter Cohort Study of Triage Score Prognostic Accuracy
No full textUnseating the Israeli Government from the UN General Assembly in Case of Non-Compliance with the Advisory Opinion of 19 July 2024
Full text linkPublic Patent Powers
Full text linkCongress has created multiple structures for agencies to control how patents are used, but that institutional design choice has received little academic attention. This Article provides the first comprehensive survey of existing laws that expressly authorize agencies to control patents. I locate 113 express conditions across 68 laws that expressly authorize executive actors to make some form of decision about patents. These powers, which I refer to as “public patent powers,” allow the government to use patented inventions, to obtain patents, to authorize third parties to use patented inventions, and to regulate how patents are used. Agencies have used many of these powers, but they have been reluctant to use others. Notably, agencies have refused to grant compulsory licenses on patents covering federally funded drugs, despite multiple requests to do so.
The descriptive account of public patent powers has several implications for patent regulation. Public patent powers show different actions that the executive branch could take without the need for any legislative action when patents create policy concerns, as is currently happening with high drug prices. Themes in public patent powers and their use also reveal consistent policy judgments present throughout the history of patent regulation in the United States. These themes create a framework for identifying contexts where executive control over patents may be appropriate and politically feasible. The descriptive account further suggests that the Supreme Court’s decision in Oil States v. Greene’s Energy may have broader implications than previously recognized. Moving forward, this Article contends that the executive branch should create an interagency framework to guide how agencies use public patent powers and that courts should consider themes in public patent powers when deciding whether to grant injunctions in patent cases
Transgender Disenfranchisement
No full textTransgender and gender variant people are excluded from formal democratic participation at the polls through a variety of legal mechanisms. Such barriers include purportedly neutral voter identification laws, which may prevent transgender people from voting given the obstacles to achieving accurate identification documents in many states, and felon disenfranchisement laws, which exclude the disproportionate number of trans people ensnared in the carceral system.
But, as this Article explains, transgender people are also deterred from public space and participation more broadly through laws and customs specifically policing gender identity. Such laws include so-called bathroom bills that prevent people from accessing facilities in government buildings, drag bans that prohibit the expression of any sort of public gender nonconformity, laws that erase queer people from public school curriculum, and laws that sanction employment discrimination against trans people, ensuring that transgender lives remain in the shadows.
As these examples suggest, voter disenfranchisement of transgender people is part of a broader political and economic disenfranchisement that seeks to erase trans people from public life and ensure that they are economically subordinate. Only by appreciating voter disenfranchisement as part of the systemic erasure of gender variance can the voter disenfranchisement laws be understood—and challenged—in their most comprehensive light. Put differently, in much the same way that racist voting regulations were just a part of the economic and political subjugation of Jim Crow, formal voting exclusion of transgender people is part of a calculated effort to segregate and erase queerness from the public square.
The extent of this political and economic disenfranchisement is brought into even sharper relief given that trans lives are literally on the ballot. In capitals around the country and in recent ballot initiatives, voters and their representatives are debating trans existence in contexts ranging from medical care to athletic participation to bathroom access, with trans lives used as a political cudgel. To comprehensively capture the harms of transgender estrangement, scholars and activists must also underscore that trans people are being foreclosed from discussion of their own lives
A New Satanic Panic
No full textA broad backlash to LGBTQ visibility and equality has emerged in recent years. Its conservative proponents have asserted that queer people are Satanic, called gender affirming healthcare child abuse, and labeled adults who teach about gender and sexuality groomers. This rhetorical shift, combined with an explosion of anti-transgender legislation, may presage a revival of the 1980s Satanic Panic, when fears of brutal crimes allegedly committed by Satanic cults swept the nation. These accusations spurred the longest trial in American history, commanded tabloid news, and led dozens of people to be convicted of lurid crimes, nearly all of whom were later exonerated. Today we are at risk of a similar panic reoccurring, in which baseless criminal prosecutions may be brought against LGBTQ people and their allies, especially in conservative Christian areas.
This Article provides the first historical account of the original Satanic Panic in the legal literature, narrating two major criminal cases and examining the underlying causes of the Panic, including backlash to the feminist and gay liberation movements. It then analyzes the widespread discourse on the political right that connects gender ideology to Satanism and child abuse, and the broad adoption of legislation restricting and criminalizing access to gender affirming healthcare. Finally, it evaluates the likelihood of a reoccurrence of the Satanic Panic, weighing the growing animus against LGBTQ people against more encouraging changes, such as improved interrogation practices. It concludes that there is a significant risk that the current moral panic around transgender people could result in a new Satanic Panic. Finally, it proposes actions that lawyers and advocates could take to reduce the likelihood of unjust prosecutions