Recent Articles in Volume 75, Issue 4 (2022)
By Richard Luedeman – Speak to enough lawyers (especially litigators) about their experiences grappling with binding appellate case law in their jurisdictions, and a significant number of them will complain about statements in appellate case law that patently contradict prior precedent, incorrectly articulate legal standards, or otherwise mangle the doctrine in an area. The image of courts as deliberative doctrine-producing machines ignores the reality that certain statements in judicial opinions might not have been carefully, deliberately constructed. Often, the result is harmless. But in some instances, doubt about the deliberateness of dubious doctrinal statements in judicial opinions can become an unavoidable problem for litigants and judges in future cases. Conventional lawyering tools—distinguishing cases factually or characterizing statements as dicta—are ill-suited to address language in judicial opinions that sets out generalizable doctrine (rather than fact-bound conclusions about a particular case) that is central to the court’s analysis and yet difficult or impossible to square with logic or with preexisting statements of the same doctrine. [...]
Bostock: A Clean Cut into the Gordian Knot of Causation
By Melissa Essary – Regardless of merit, most individual employment discrimination claims die a fast death at summary judgment. Judges apply the fine mesh net created by McDonnell Douglas v. Green, and most cases are caught in its trap. This dated, obfuscatory Supreme Court case creates a complex and flawed binary approach to causation: either discrimination or an innocent reason caused an adverse employment action. For decades, all three levels of the federal judiciary have wrestled with McDonnell Douglas, creating snarls and knots in construing causation. Because of this causal confusion, the ideal of equal opportunity in employment is on life-support. [...]
By Daryl Lim – Artificial intelligence (AI) has helped determine vaccine recipients, prioritize emergency room admissions, and ascertain individual hires, sometimes doing so inequitably. As we emerge from the Pandemic, technological progress and efficiency demands continue to press all areas of the law, including intellectual property (IP) law, toward incorporating more AI into legal practice. This may be good when AI promotes economic and social justice in the IP system. However, AI may amplify inequity as biased developers create biased algorithms with biased inputs or rely on biased proxies. This Article argues that policymakers need to take a thoughtful and concerted approach to graft AI into IP law and practice if social justice principles of access, inclusion, and empowerment flow from their union. It explores what it looks like to obtain AI justice in the IP context and focuses on two areas where IP law impedes equitable AI-related outcomes. The first involves the civil rights concerns that stem from trade secrets blocking access and deflecting accountability in biased algorithms or data. The second concerns the patent and copyright doctrine biases perpetuating historical inequity in AI-augmented processes. The Article also ad- dresses how equity by design should look and provides a roadmap for implementing equity audits to mitigate bias. Finally, it briefly examines how AI would assist with adjudicating equitable IP law doctrines, which also tests the outer limits of what bounded AI processes can do. [...]