Florida A&M University - Florida State University College of Engineering
Florida State University College of LawNot a member yet
4903 research outputs found
Sort by
FSU Law Focus - 03/22/2021
Get PDFFrom the Dean: Moot Court wins fourth championship of 2020-21 season; BLSA Hosts Expert Panel on Incarceration; Alum Profile: Anthony James “Jim” Spalla (’70); Student Profile: 3L Luc C. Mazzini, IIhttps://ir.law.fsu.edu/fsu-law-focus/1215/thumbnail.jp
FSU Law Focus - 03/26/2021
Get PDFFrom the Dean: Fourth consecutive Moot Court Team win; Students Present Before International Commission as Part of New Lawyering a Movement Course; Alum Profile: Maxwell J. Dauerman (’12); Student Profile: 3L Vanessa Marquezhttps://ir.law.fsu.edu/fsu-law-focus/1220/thumbnail.jp
FSU Law Focus - 04/09/2021
Get PDFFrom the Dean: Accepting nominations for our Exemplary Public Service Career Award; BLSA Hosts Panel on Being an Anti-Racist Advocate; Alum Profile: Hon. Thomas N. Palermo (’01); Student Profile: 3L Nabeha Shaerhttps://ir.law.fsu.edu/fsu-law-focus/1236/thumbnail.jp
FSU Law Focus - 02/21/2021
Get PDFFrom the Dean: Environmental, Energy & Land Use Law Certificate Program hosted 2021 Energy Law Panel “Rooftop Solar Energy in Florida: Opportunities and Obstacles”; FSU BLSA Hosts Panel on Death Penalty; Alum Profile: Danielle A. Cohen Higgins (’06); Student Profile: 3L Macgregor Hudsonhttps://ir.law.fsu.edu/fsu-law-focus/1314/thumbnail.jp
Negligent Innovation
Get PDFInnovation is the buzzword of our time. Everyone wants to be an innovator. Corporations strive to be innovative. All this hype is good. Technological innovation is accepted as the single most important driver of economic growth. We should be obsessed with innovation. As such, it is not at all surprising that innovation and technological commercialization lie at the heart of justifications for the patent system. But there is something quite odd about these theories and indeed with our patent system: they never actually require innovation. A patentee is not obligated to take on the risky work of development and commercialization. They are never required to deliver the promise of their invention. A patentee can just wait for others to commercialize and then the patentee can emerge to hold-up and tax those actual innovators. And surprisingly, it is the commercialization theories, with their demands for strong patent protection, that provide cover for these non-innovators. This Article aims to correct this by building a tort-based commercialization theory focused on protecting actual innovators. Significant benefits flow from this view. First, it describes unintentional patent infringement as a real accident, like a car crash. This demystifies patent liability by emphasizing the real, wasted resources that infringement entails. Second, this accident model provides a compelling explanation for some (but not all) independent inventor liability. Independent inventors should be liable for infringement only when they could have reasonably avoided the accident. Independent inventors should be liable when they are negligent innovators. Conversely though, for patent assertion entities, their inaction contributes to the accident, and their contributory negligence should reduce or eliminate patent remedies against inadvertent infringers. Third, this patent accident framing clarifies the long-standing puzzle of patent timing. It explains why patent rights attach early at the time of invention even when later commercialization is the ultimate goal
Privacy\u27s Three Mile Island and the Need to Protect Political Privacy in Private-Law Contexts
Get PDFWhen it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica obtained the personal and private information of eighty-seven million Facebook users to aid the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump, it was described as privacy\u27s Three Mile Island : an event, like the famed nuclear accident from which the term comes, that would shake and shape an industry and its approach to digital privacy and the underlying political information such privacy protects. In the intervening four years, despite these revelations, while some social media companies took voluntary measures to prevent a repeat of the types of abuses that plagued the 2016 election, little has changed in terms of the legal infrastructure that could protect the type of private information essential to the functioning of democracies. But what the Cambridge Analytica scandal also made clear is that threats to private information revealed and embedded in our digital activities threaten democracy. What is more, these threats risk undermining individual identity and autonomy and the ability of individuals to pursue individual and collective self-determination. An individual\u27s political identity-with whom she associates, what she says, what she thinks, the questions and ideas she explores, for whom she votes-is all caught up in notions of political privacy. While current public-law protections are fairly robust when it comes to protecting political privacy, even as some fear that current responses to the pandemic may require a degree of intrusion upon privacy by government, the threats to privacy that have emerged in the digital age preceded the current public health crisis and emanate mostly from private actors, where protections for political privacy are quite weak. Nevertheless, democracy requires a high degree of protection for individual identity and political privacy, regardless of the source of the threat, especially when the lines between private action and public effects are blurred, as in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Given the importance of the integrity of identity to democracy and the fact that many of the threats to political privacy emanate from private actors, as this Article shows, enhanced protections for this political privacy are also necessary in the private-law context. Calls for greater protection of digital privacy often result in recommendations that a single institution-the market, political bodies, or the courts-should take a greater role in policing online privacy. Yet these institutions are often interdependent when it comes to protecting digital privacy, and, by extension, political privacy. Efforts promoted through one institution can often have positive-and negative-spillover effects on the functioning of other institutions: they can at times strengthen the protections of such privacy in other institutional settings or undermine the ability of those other institutions to function effectively to protect political privacy. So which institution or set of institutions is best suited to protect such political privacy? This question calls for the application of the method known as comparative institutional analysis, which assesses the relative strengths and weaknesses of different institutions in achieving desired policy goals. At the same time, as this discussion will reveal, even comparative institutional analysis, if it does not take into account the extent to which different institutional settings can have spillover effects on the ability of other institutions to achieve particular policy goals, fails to offer sufficient tools for the assessment of the best institution or institutions to achieve such goals. Indeed, as this Article attempts to show, at least when it comes to protecting political privacy in private-law contexts, any effective institutional response to the threats to political privacy will likely require not just an appreciation for the ways in which different institutional settings are interdependent when it comes to achieving that goal but also that any such effort will require an integrated and comprehensive approach that spans different institutional settings. In the end, this Article is an attempt to use the tools of comparative institutional analysis to assess the relative abilities of different institutions to protect political privacy, including an assessment of the litigation that has arisen in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, to determine the role of different institutions in protecting political privacy in private-law--as opposed to public-law-settings. Through a review of this and other litigation to protect digital privacy, which, more and more, affects political privacy, I will show not just how different institutional settings can strengthen the functioning of other settings but also how they can undermine such settings. Thus, given the fact that institutions that protect political privacy can often work at cross-purposes in policing political privacy, this Article argues for the need for comprehensive, integrated, and cooperative action across institutions to ensure the proper protection of this type of privacy
Anti-Science Ideology
Get PDFPolitical attacks against scientists and scientific research are nothing new, though the Trump Administration appears to have increased both the breadth and the depth of such attacks. What is new, it seems, are attacks on science that are not in service of protecting any identifiable regulated industry. Under the Trump Administration, the attacks on science are more systemic, and aimed more at reducing scientific capacity in the federal government, rather than mere one-off policy interventions to help an individual industry.
This Article suggests that the Trump Administration, more than previous administrations, has sought to use science as part of a political culture war, reviving a populist suspicion of intellectuals that has a long and cyclical history in American culture. This current episode of anti-intellectualism, while targeting social science as past episodes have, has also uniquely targeted the biological and physical sciences, the difference being that findings in these fields are more firmly grounded in empirical fact than in the social sciences. The Trump Administration\u27s attacks on science, writ larger, are non-epistemic in nature, seeking to build an ideology of hostility to science. This strategy builds upon a decades-long and continuing misinformation campaign to discredit climate scientists but goes further and seeks to portray scientists as part of the deep state that is conspiring to victimize Americans.
To be sure, federal funding for most research unrelated to industry regulation remains robust, even higher in some programs. But a manufactured suspicion of regulatory science (relating to industry regulation) has begun to bleed ominously over into policy arenas completely outside of regulation. The Trump Administration\u27s policy meanderings to deal with the COVID-19 crisis are emblematic of a growing and systemic subjugation of science to political objectives, ones that can be bizarrely unscientific. A number of cultural, political, and economic factors contribute to this latest resurgence of anti-intellectualism, one with a unique animus towards the hard sciences. A restoration of endangered and broken societal norms governing the advancement of science will require vigorous enforcement of federal administrative laws but will also require the development of government policies that address the cultural, political, and economic roots of this latest crisis of science
Negligent Innovation
Get PDFInnovation is the buzzword of our time. Everyone wants to be an innovator. Corporations strive to be innovative. All this hype is good. Technological innovation is accepted as the single most important driver of economic growth. We should be obsessed with innovation. As such, it is not at all surprising that innovation and technological commercialization lie at the heart of justifications for the patent system. But there is something quite odd about these theories and indeed with our patent system: they never actually require innovation. A patentee is not obligated to take on the risky work of development and commercialization. They are never required to deliver the promise of their invention. A patentee can just wait for others to commercialize and then the patentee can emerge to hold-up and tax those actual innovators. And surprisingly, it is the commercialization theories, with their demands for strong patent protection, that provide cover for these non-innovators. This Article aims to correct this by building a tort-based commercialization theory focused on protecting actual innovators. Significant benefits flow from this view. First, it describes unintentional patent infringement as a real accident, like a car crash. This demystifies patent liability by emphasizing the real, wasted resources that infringement entails. Second, this accident model provides a compelling explanation for some (but not all) independent inventor liability. Independent inventors should be liable for infringement only when they could have reasonably avoided the accident. Independent inventors should be liable when they are negligent innovators. Conversely though, for patent assertion entities, their inaction contributes to the accident, and their contributory negligence should reduce or eliminate patent remedies against inadvertent infringers. Third, this patent accident framing clarifies the long-standing puzzle of patent timing. It explains why patent rights attach early at the time of invention even when later commercialization is the ultimate goal
Insuring Apologies
Get PDFBased on evidence demonstrating that an apology from a wrongdoer to a victim can assuage the victim\u27s anger, reduce the likelihood that the victim seeks legal redress, and facilitate settlement, state legislatures have passed apology laws to encourage the delivery of more apologies. Aimed primarily at medical malpractice litigation-a traditional locus of the tort reform effort-apology laws render apologies from physicians to patients inadmissible in subsequent legal proceedings. In theory, privileging apologies will encourage their use and reduce malpractice liability risk as patients assert fewer claims and settle those claims that are asserted. However, if apology laws encourage the delivery of insincere or disingenuous apologies, liability risk may increase, as such apologies exacerbate, rather than assuage, patient anger. Similarly, if apology laws encourage physicians to offer apologies that signal the occurrence of malpractice that otherwise would have gone undiscovered, physician liability risk may increase. Thus, apology laws may increase or decrease medical malpractice liability risk, and the nature of their ultimate effect has sparked an intense debate among scholars, policymakers, and physicians. This Article shows that apology laws have the counterintuitive effect of increasing liability risk. To evaluate whether apology laws work as intended, I examine a novel dataset of medical malpractice insurance premiums charged to physicians over nineteen years. This dataset provides a better measure of liability risk than publicly available-but incomplete-) data on malpractice claims used in prior work. Across three separate specialties (general surgery, internal medicine, and obstetrics/gynecology), my analysis demonstrates that apology laws increase the premiums charged to physicians by between 10 and 16 percent. These increases translate into substantial additional costs for individual physicians, with surgeons, internists, and obstetricians paying 1,700, and $7,200 more in annual premiums, respectively. Based on strong and consistent evidence that apology laws increase, not decrease, malpractice liability risk, I argue that these laws fail to achieve their stated goal. Also on the basis of this evidence, I propose several alternative legal strategies for legislatures to accomplish their goals
FSU Law Focus - 11/12/2021
Get PDFFrom the Dean: 2021 Moot Court Final Four Competition; Professor Ziegler in the Spotlight; Alum Profile: Marc W. Dunbar (\u2794); Student Profile: 3L Niakoaa Nia Anan-Ankomahhttps://ir.law.fsu.edu/fsu-law-focus/1042/thumbnail.jp