Professor Robin Fretwell Wilson has spent significant time researching the Right to Contraception Act, put forward by Democratic leaders who want to preserve rights regarding matters of reproductive health care. Drawing upon her work in Utah and other states on laws associated with religious freedom, LGBTQ rights, and adoption, Wilson thinks this bill is a chance for effective bipartisan collaboration. “This is eminently doable,” Wilson said.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Purdue Pharma bankruptcy, Professor Ralph Brubaker—who submitted an amicus brief in the case—published an article in the Harvard Law School Bankruptcy Roundtable on the implications of the ruling and issues that remain unsettled after the ruling. “Unless bankruptcy is to become a facile end-run around multiple constitutional protections for both individual tort claimants and state sovereignty,…the ‘subject of Bankruptcies’ (within the meaning of the Constitution’s Bankruptcy Clause) must be limited by a requirement of necessity for bankruptcy relief,” Brubaker writes.
Jamelle Sharpe, dean of the University of Illinois College of Law, has been named one of the 2024-25 President’s Executive Leadership Program (PELP) Fellows by University of Illinois System President Timothy Killeen. Out of 80 nominations, Sharpe is one of six individuals from the Urbana-Champaign campus and 20 overall chosen for this honor. PELP is a professional development program designed to broaden participants’ understanding of higher education issues and to strengthen their leadership skills; it consists of four multi-day seminars in Chicago, Urbana-Champaign, Springfield, and Washington, D.C.
“It is foundational to our criminal justice system that the government has to prove mens rea,” Professor Tony Ghiotto said on a recent episode of the Litigator Libations podcast. The podcast, he discussed Diaz v. United States, in which the Supreme Court recently ruled on expert testimony and a defendant’s mental state. His segment examined how close an expert may come to providing an opinion on a ultimate issue (such as whether the accused held a specific intent).
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.”