News featuring a faculty member
The patent battle over CRISPR-Cas9 technology has gone on for longer than a decade, but continues to wind its way through the courts. The global CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing market size is expected to grow to $14.65 billion by 2032, and Professor Jacob Sherkow told BioSpace that companies seeking to license the technology may be content to wait and see how the patent battle settles rather than rushing to pay now. “If you get that wrong, that is a lot of money you set on fire,” Sherkow said.
Professor Suja Thomas presented on Court of Appeals cases decided this past year as part of “The Year in Review: Significant Developments in Employment Law” at the Annual National Employment Lawyers Association Convention in Philadelphia on June 29, 2024. The convention is designed to provide continuing legal education for the plaintiffs’ bar, including attorneys, paraprofessionals, law students, and other workers’ rights advocates.
After the Biden administration announced a new executive order aimed at protecting the undocumented spouses and children of U.S. citizens from deportation, the Illinois News Bureau spoke to Professor Lauren Aronson to clarify some of the legal details. “It’s not ‘mass amnesty’ because it benefits so few individuals, but it is sort of an amnesty in that it forgives people who entered the country without permission,” she explained.
Professor Colleen Murphy has been invited to join the International Advisory Board of the Italian Journal FQP/PPI Filosofia e questioni Pubbliche/ Philosophy and Public Issues. Founded in 1992 by Sebastiano Maffettone, the journal has been a reference for normative political philosophy in Italy for more than 30 years. The Board has plans to launch a new series of the journal with a new publisher, Giappichelli, with the aim of further enhancing the journal’s national and global profile. As part of the refreshed international advisory board, Murphy and her colleagues aim to contribute to the public discussion of the most pressing contemporary debates about politics, social and political institutions, and morality, with a keen interest in normative theory.
“For any court process to be seen as fair, people must see the judge as unbiased and believe the judge based the decision only on the evidence presented,” Professor Robert Lawless writes in an opinion article published by Bloomberg Law. Though this statement seems uncontroversial, the practice of “venue shopping” for bankruptcy proceedings undermines the credibility of the courts. Lawless writes that some bankruptcy judges have openly admitted wanting to attract large Chapter 11 cases, which makes their decisions seem less than legitimate, a problem that must be remedied.
In the world of technology, there is a maxim about the division of labor that states, “The US produces technology and the EU produces rules.” This is the center of a new article by Anu Bradford, which was recently reviewed by Professor Verity Winship. In her review, Winship notes “Bradford’s super-power as a scholar is the ability to take something that has been recognized and analyzed in piecemeal form, and then to enlarge the framework and fundamentally shift how we talk about the area.” By applying this “super-power” to the US-EU technological rights conflict, Bradford creates an article that is “sophisticated, timely…well worth a read.”
After the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, citing war crimes and crimes against humanity, including starvation, Real Clear History put together a primer on how starvation went from a tactic to a war crime. Professor Patrick Keenan helped provide some context, sharing details about the use of starvation in the U.S. Civil War.
Professors Heidi M. Hurd and Michael Moore delivered keynote lectures at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law in Freiburg, Germany, as part of a multi-day, international, multi-disciplinary conference on the topic of Criminal Liability for Negligence. Hurd spoke about the topic of Criminal Responsibility for Carelessness and Moore spoke about Defending a Choice-Based Theory of Criminal Responsibility. Attending the conference were leading criminal law scholars in law, psychology, political science, and philosophy across Europe and within Anglo-American legal systems.
The practice of using “patent thickets,” which allow pharmaceutical companies to delay low-cost generic medicines reaching the market, is being targeted by a rule change proposed by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The change would reduce the number of terminal disclaimers, an important part of patent thickets, which offers the potential to speed the entry of generic drugs to the market, Professor Jacob Sherkow explained to STAT. He cautioned, however, that companies may still find clever ways to skirt the rules.
Since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, there has been a concerted effort among lawmakers to codify the right to access contraception. This manifested itself this summer in Senate Bill 4381, which Professor Robin Wilson says is “a worthy legislative endeavor,” with the caveat that “it needs to be done with sensitivity to our constitutional design.” In her opinion article, published in the Deseret News, she suggests that this is a great chance for Congress to come together in a bipartisan fashion to create a good piece of legislation.