What Would Justice Blackmun Say? A Response to Dobbs.

Dobbs appears more extreme when juxtaposed against Roe's hidden history. Justice Blackmun was the author of Roe, but the opinion was the product of a remarkable collaboration that incorporated the suggestions of many Justices. Thus, Roe's medical framing embodied the vision of the Court as a whole, not one individual.

Thurgood Marshall, Hero of American Medicine.

One of the heroes in American history, Associate Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993) sought legal remedies against racial discrimination in education and health care. As director of the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) of NAACP from 1940 to 1961, his success in integrating law schools in Texas led to the first black medical student admitted to a state medical school in the South. Representing doctors and dentists needing a facility to perform surgery, the LDF brought cases before the courts in North Carolina that moved the country toward justice in health care. His ultimate legal victory came in 1954, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the decision that declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. In 1964, the LDF under Jack Greenberg, Marshall's successor as director, won Simkins v. Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital, a decision that held that hospitals accepting federal funds had to admit black patients. The two decisions laid the judicial foundation for the laws and administrative acts that changed America's racial history, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Social Security Act Amendments of 1965 that established Medicare and Medicaid. His achievements came during the hottest period of the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Well past the middle of the twentieth century, black Americans were denied access to the full resources of American medicine, locked in a "separate-but-equal" system woefully inadequate in every respect. In abolishing segregation, Marshall initiated the long overdue remedy of the unjust legacies of slavery and Jim Crow.

Avoiding hindsight in non-obviousness determination: case law review of pharmaceutical patents and guidance from the KSR v Teleflex decision.

Introduction: Hindsight bias is the tendency to estimate an outcome once it is known. Legal systems are often prone to hindsight bias. In patent law, the non-obviousness or inventive step is the most critical determinant of patentability and often subjected to hindsight bias.Areas covered: Scholarly literature confirms the existence of hindsight bias in different patent systems. This communication hence addresses factors, which lead to hindsight bias specifically in chemical and pharmaceutical arts, guidance from the case law that can be helpful in avoiding hindsight bias in non-obviousness determination.Expert opinion: The Supreme Court in 2007, advocated a more expansive and flexible approach to where the Teaching Suggestion or Motivation test could come from. In the case of chemical and pharmaceutical active compounds, the considerations such as i) was there sufficient motivation to modify the lead compound and arrive at the claimed compound and its properties, ii) was there a reasonable expectation of success to achieve the claimed property and other such considerations highlighted in this review may contribute to avoid hindsight bias in non-obviousness determination.

Patenting a living microbial cell: 40th anniversary of US Supreme Court decision Diamond versus Chakrabarty.

Patents for microbiology and biotechnology are generally for a process (for example DNA cloning; and polymerase chain reaction, PCR) and not for the microbe itself. The patent for oil degrading bacteria was different in that it covered the modified microbial cell itself, a Pseudomonas strain with laboratory-assembled plasmids that encoded the bacterial degradation of multiple components of crude oil. It was first applied for in 1972, initially refused by the patent office on the basis that it was a living organism, and then eight years later in June 1980 allowed by the US Supreme Court ruling that this did not matter and the only issue was whether it was a novel manufactured product.

Forensic Experts, Indigent Defendants, and the Constitution.

Over 30 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court held that indigent defendants raising psychiatric issues are entitled to the assistance of a mental health expert. However, the exact dimensions of that assistance, and whether the expert must be assigned exclusively to assist the defense, have been in contention ever since. In its recent decision in McWilliams v. Dunn, the Court underscored that the state-funded expert must be available to consult with the defense, not merely to evaluate the defendant, but declined to opine on whether the defense is entitled to its own expert for the purpose.

The Hyde Amendment at 40 Years and Reproductive Rights in the United States: Perennial and Panoptic.

This Viewpoint discusses the evolution of the Hyde Amendment, which in 1976 prohibited use of medical funds to pay for abortion except when the mother's life is endangered, and efforts since then to nullify the amendment or codify it as a federal statute.

The influence of neuroscience on US Supreme Court decisions about adolescents' criminal culpability.

In the past 8 years, the US Supreme Court has issued landmark opinions in three cases that involved the criminal culpability of juveniles. In the most recent case, in 2012, a ruling prohibited states from mandating life without parole for crimes committed by minors. In these cases, the Court drew on scientific studies of the adolescent brain in concluding that adolescents, by virtue of their inherent psychological and neurobiological immaturity, are not as responsible for their behaviour as adults. This article discusses the Court's rationale in these cases and the role of scientific evidence about adolescent brain development in its decisions. I conclude that the neuroscientific evidence was probably persuasive to the Court not because it revealed something new about the nature of adolescence but precisely because it aligned with common sense and behavioural science.

Unformed minds: juveniles, neuroscience, and the law.

Recently, the question of adolescent culpability has been brought before the Supreme Court of the United States for reconsideration. Neuroscience, adolescent advocates claim, is teaching us that young people cannot be found fully responsible for their actions. The reason: their brains are not fully formed. Here I consider the history of the use of scientific evidence in the courtroom, a number of adolescent murder cases, and the data now emerging from neuroscience, and argue that when it comes to brains, judges, just like the rest of us, are unnecessarily impressed. Ultimately, how we determine culpability should rest on normative and ethical considerations rather than on scientific ones.