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Recent Print Edition:
Articles
Articles
Volume 110, Issue 2
Abuse of Contract: Boilerplate Erasure of Consumer Counterparty Rights
Andrea J. Boyack
Contract law and the new Restatement of the Law of Consumer Contracts generally treats the entirety of a company’s boilerplate as presumptively binding. Entrusting the content of consumer contracts to companies creates a fertile legal habitat for abuse through boilerplate design. . . .
Article IV and Indian Tribes
Grant Christensen
Unlike the first three articles of the Constitution which create the three branches of the federal government and articulate their limited powers, Article IV establishes a set of rules to police the actions of states and knit them together into a single union. Notably absent from Article IV is any mention of the tribal sovereign. . . .
Predictable Unpredictability: The Surprising Administrability of Patent Subject Matter Eligibility
Nikola L. Datzov & Jason Rantanen
More than a decade has passed since the Supreme Court established the current framework for evaluating patent subject matter eligibility. Despite
widespread recognition that subject matter eligibility is one of the most important areas of patent law, the impact of the Supreme Court’s decisions continues to draw sharp criticism and remains a hotly contested issue. . . .
Presuming Enough? Keeping the PACT Act’s Promise
Meghan E. Brooks
Sick veterans have long disproportionately borne the costs of scientific uncertainty as to whether military toxic exposures cause cancers and more. The relaxed evidentiary standards that make the “uniquely pro-claimant” veterans benefits system work for traditional battlefield injuries do not achieve the same results for toxic exposures, where causal relationships to disease require population-level data and years of study. . . .
The Case for Specific Performance of Personal Service Contracts
Kimberly D. Krawiec & Nathan B. Oman
The per se rule against specific enforcement of personal service contracts is well established under Anglo-American contract law. At the same time, there is a well-developed literature suggesting that specific performance is often a superior remedy to money damages, and those arguments apply with equal or greater force to personal service contracts. . . .
Overcoming Racial Harms to Democracy from Artificial Intelligence
Spencer Overton
While the United States is becoming more racially diverse, generative artificial intelligence and related technologies threaten to undermine truly representative democracy. Left unchecked, AI will exacerbate already substantial existing challenges, such as racial polarization, cultural anxiety, antidemocratic attitudes, racial vote dilution, and voter suppression. . . .
Notes
Student Notes
Volume 110, Issue 2
A Field of [Employment] Dreams: Advocating for the Treatment of Student-Athletes as Employees in Iowa
Allie Gilchrist
For decades, student-athletes faced limited financial aid in scholarships, the denial of name, image, and likeness opportunities, and the refusal to treat student-athletes as employees. With the NCAA recently allowing name, image, and likeness compensation following significant pressure from state legislatures and the recent Johnson v. NCAA case that could upend amateurism in college athletics pending, now is the time for universities and the NCAA to recognize and compensate student-athletes as employees. . . .
Settling Skaar: The End of Class Actions and the Need for New Mass Adjudication of Veteran Claims for Disability Compensation
Sydney L. Wagner
Aggregation of claims is an invaluable tool for administrative agencies that receive hundreds of thousands of claims each year. These agencies use a variety of tools, but one agency that does not aggregate claims is the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Board of Veterans’ Appeals. . . .
The Smell of Money? An Iowa-Focused Impact Analysis of National Pork Producers Council v. Ross
Alec T. Goos
Federalism is the foundation of the American governmental system with the dormant Commerce Clause serving as a barrier against states reaching beyond their borders. The dormant Commerce Clause was tested in the U.S. Supreme Court case, National Pork Producers Council v. Ross over California’s Proposition 12, an animal health and welfare ballot measure that regulates the sale of livestock into the California marketplace. . . .
It’s Not Just Physical: Broadening Protections for “Domestic Abuse” in Iowa
Joshua W. Wente
Society’s understanding of domestic violence has evolved since the Iowa Legislature enacted Chapter 236 in 1979. When domestic violence emerged as a prominent social issue, the focus was on physical abuse and its visible effects. . . .
Recent Online Edition:
Recent Online Edition:
How the Supreme Court Ghosted the PHOSITA: Amgen and Legal Constructs in Patent Law
Timothy R. Holbrook & Mark D. Janis
This Essay is an invited response to The Ghost in the Patent System: An Empirical Study of Patent Law’s Elusive “Skilled Artisan,” by Professors Laura Pedraza-Fariña and Ryan Whalen. In their piece, Pedraza-Fariña and Ryan Whalen offer an empirical study and use it to argue for a new conception of the Person Having Ordinary Skill in the Art (“PHOSITA”), patent law’s nod to the “reasonable person” construct. . . .
The Game, the Players, and the Board
Bruce E. Boyden
109 Iowa L. Rev. Online 105 (2024)
Christopher Seaman and Thuan Tran’s fascinating article, Intellectual Property and Tabletop Games, raises important questions about the role of intellectual property (“IP”) in developing and distributing innovative products. The market for tabletop games, Seaman and Tran argue, is able to sustain a high level of creativity at a high up-front cost, all while protected by some but not all of the IP rights that other industries’ outputs receive. Is that evidence of IP’s necessity or its superfluousness? . . .
Interpreting Textualist Slogans
Guha Krishnamurthi
109 Iowa L. Rev. Online 15 (2023)
Slogans are a blunt instrument—they may convey something of the truth, but they rarely do so undented. So too is the case with the influential textualism slogans “the text is [the] law,” “only the text [is] the law,” and “[o]nly the written word is the law.” In his insightful Article, Professor Erik Encarnacion shows why these statements are false, as they are category errors. He then observes that these slogans are unnecessary to establishing the core theses of textualism and that these slogans misunderstand and confuse features of textualism. And he is right about all of that. . . .
Should the Recent Timbs and Dobbs Decisions Revive Interest in the Excessive Fines Clause as the Constitutional Basis . . .
N. William Hines
109 Iowa L. Rev. Online 46 (2024)
In a series of cases in the early 1990s, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment implicitly enabled federal courts to review state punitive damages awards for unconstitutional arbitrariness and excessiveness. Before settling on the Due Process Clause as the basis of federal regulation of punitive damages, in a 1989 decision the Court considered and rejected the claim that the Excessive Fines Clause of the Eighth Amendment, as incorporated into the Fourteenth Amendment, could provide the constitutional foundation for federal regulation of state punitive damages awards. . . .
The Racism of Immigration Crime Prosecution
Ingrid V. Eagly
109 Iowa L. Rev. Online 27 (2023)
Eric Fish’s Article, Race, History, and Immigration Crimes, explores the racist motivation behind the original 1929 enactment of the two most common federal immigration crimes, entry without permission and reentry after deportation. This Response engages with Fish’s archival work unearthing this unsettling history and examines how his research has informed a series of legal challenges seeking to strike down the modern federal border crossing law as violating the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. . . .
Does DARC Really Matter?: A Response to Wright & Moore
Troy A. Rule
109 Iowa L. Rev. Online 1 (2023)
Danaya Wright and Ethan Moore’s Article, DARC Matters: Repurposing Nineteenth-Century Property Law for the Twenty-First Century, is a valuable contribution to a growing body of legal academic literature focused on property law obstacles to the deployment of commercial drone technologies. Wright and Moore rightly acknowledge landowners’ long-held rights to exclude objects from the low airspace immediately above their land–rights that some major retailers have aggressively sought to weaken in recent years to facilitate drone delivery services. . . .