Recent ucilr items

Climate Last Resorts

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The United States faces a climate crisis, an affordable housing crisis, and, linking them both, an insurance crisis. At the intersection of these concurrent predicaments lie a set of little-known but surprisingly impactful policies: state Insurer of Last Resort (ILR) programs. ILRs are state policies that provide property insurance when private insurance is unavailable, such as when private insurers determine that climate hazards are too risky to underwrite.

This Article argues that long-overlooked ILR programs are quickly becoming lynchpins for addressing some of today’s most pressing concerns around climate, housing, and insurance. Accordingly, ILRs bear urgent attention and reevaluation. In short, ILR progr ams are likely the most important policies that you’ve never heard of.

Building on this observation, the Article makes three main contributions. First, it identifies the power of ILR programs as intersectional policy responses to the concurrent insurance,...

Regulating Tech Titans

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In 2025, regulating tech giants like Google and Amazon has emerged as a key issue on the U.S. government’s agenda, with antitrust law returning to the forefront. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Europe has introduced a new law, the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which regulates large online platforms, identified as “gatekeepers”. The DMA requires gatekeepers to adhere to specific obligations and prohibitions, typically subject to antitrust case-by-case scrutiny, to ensure fairness and contestability in digital markets. The European historical intellectual framework underpins the core features of the DMA, including its legal framework, approach, scope, and purpose. Since 2021, several antitrust bills have proposed a U.S. version of the DMA, aiming to reform antitrust law by adopting a similar legal framework, approach, scope, and purpose. However, this raises critical questions: Does the U.S. antitrust historical intellectual framework support the adoption of the DMA? Would a DMA...

Immigration Law’s Internal Dimension

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Immigration law is typically conceived as a body of law governing when noncitizens may enter the United States from abroad. But as revealed by recent controversies over migrants bused from Texas to cities like New York and Chicago, immigration law is not only concerned with who may cross the country’s borders, but also where people go within those borders. Immigration law, broadly understood, is not limited to questions of admission and deportation. It also shapes the geographic dispersal of refugees and immigrant workers throughout the United States.

This Article contends that a complete account of immigration law requires understanding the ways in which it regulates the internal migration of noncitizens. This account involves grappling with immigration law both within the federal statutory scheme, and across numerous state and local regulations of undocumented immigrants. Recognizing this internal dimension of immigration law today also reveals a much longer...

The Military’s Abortion Crisis in the Aftermath of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Women in the military have not had access to abortion care since 1978, when Congress introduced an amendment to a Department of Defense (DoD) appropriations bill, later codified under 10 U.S.C. § 1093, that prohibited the use of DoD funds for abortions. While women have endured this second-class health care for over four decades, the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has created new problems for servicewomen and the military writ large. Now military women must travel off-base and, in some instances, out-of-state or out-of-country, to seek an abortion. While women in and out of uniform share this burden, servicewomen must comply with military constraints that exacerbate their situation, including following orders that require them to be stationed in states that criminalize abortion, reporting their pregnancy up their chain of command, following leave protocols that require their commander’s approval when traveling for abortion...

Abolitionist Community Economic Development: Dismantling Racial Capital and Forging Black Autonomous Futures

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This Note explores Abolitionist Community Economic Development (ACED) as a potential model for radical reform aimed at addressing entrenched racial and economic injustices in Black communities. This Note argues that traditional Community Economic Development (CED) projects often fall short of addressing the root causes of social and economic injustice in Black communities, as they tend to rely on external investment, risk triggering gentrification, and lack focus on redistributing power and rectifying historical injustices. In contrast, ACED emphasizes community ownership, long-term resilience, and direct control over resources, providing a more sustainable and empowering approach to tackling systemic inequalities. Using the framework established by Mabre Stahly-Butts and Amna Akbar in Reforms for Radicals? An Abolitionist Framework, this Note examines ACED initiatives like Cooperation Jackson and The Guild to assess their alignment with criteria for genuine radical...

Patenting Video Gameplay

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Gameplay is the core of video games, a two-hundred-billion-dollar business larger than the film and music industries combined. For years, commentators and public interest groups have claimed that video gameplay patents are stifling innovation—concerns that have garnered little attention from scholars or courts. That may soon change. Recent literature speculates that gameplay patents are rare and that challenges in acquiring them have forced companies to prioritize “copy-resistant” game elements such as high-definition graphics and sprawling open worlds. But advances in artificial intelligence are making such elements increasingly easy to recreate, prompting a renewed interest in gameplay innovation and a growing urgency to assess the merits of gameplay patents. This Article provides the empirical and analytical foundation for understanding the existence and merits of video gameplay patents. It trains a naive Bayes classifier to provide novel insight into gameplay patenting...

Cover

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Cover

Mission Statement

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Mission Statement

The Social Costs of Health Care

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Imagine you had to choose between your health and your freedom. Many Americans do. Choices to work, marry, retire, move, cohabitate—all are influenced by health care finance laws. Access to health insurance is not guaranteed, and eligibility comes with social costs. For the publicly insured, recipients forgo work, marriage, and security in old age to meet strict income and asset tests. People with disabilities, their medical needs pigeon-holed into public programs, are denied equal opportunity in this way. Employer-sponsored insurance presents its own costs, limiting the range of jobs people take, when they can retire, and whether to marry and divorce. Medicaid expansion and premium tax credits mitigate these harms by degrees but are diminished under the current presidential administration.

Research is conclusive that social conditions shape our health. The inverse is also true, that the health care system shapes social conditions. This undermines goals of a health care...

From Proposition 209 to SFFA v. Harvard: Affirmative Action in Higher Education

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Affirmative action is an active effort through policies aiming to provide opportunities for populations who have been historically underrepresented by allowing them to gain access to education, employment, and business contracting by using race as a factor. In California, the passage of Proposition 209 during the 1996 California ballot initiative created the end to affirmative action programs within the state. With the end of affirmative action programs in California, this Note explores the impact Proposition 209 left for underrepresented racial groups within higher education, specifically in the University of California (U.C.) system. Moreover, this Note addresses misconceptions created by opponents of affirmative action, such as the “mismatch theory” and harm towards the Asian American population. In 2023, the United States Supreme Court held in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard that race-based affirmative action programs would be unconstitutional. With the...

Masthead

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Masthead

The Price of Disinformation

Fri, 5 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The general public is misinformed on a broad range of vitally important topics, such as what the true crime rates are, whether the COVID-19 vaccine is part of a conspiracy to control the population, and who won the last presidential election. There are myriad factors contributing to this epistemic crisis wherein large segments of the public form false belief on these and other major issues. One factor is the vast amount of intentionally false speech disseminated to mislead the public, often termed “disinformation.” Leaders in politics, industry, and the media spread disinformation for their own self-serving purposes. These purposes include turning a profit, growing an audience, and getting elected to office. Although the law prohibits “fraud,” the legal definition of that term—that determines to a great extent the scope of which deceptions are actionable and which are protected speech—is narrowly focused on personal fraud. Schemes to defraud that are aimed at the public at...

Algorithmic Personalization Features and Democratic Values: What Regulation Initiatives Are Missing

Fri, 5 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

2024 was poised to be the largest election year in history, with pivotal elections in Asia, Europe, and the Americas encompassing regional, legislative, and presidential contests, capturing the attention of half the globe. In an era dominated by social media, these elections were influenced by information dissemination through digital platforms.

Over the last two decades, the landscape of public discourse in matters of civic concern has undergone a transformative shift, moving from traditional media to personalized digital social media outlets. Algorithmic features now selectively match content to users, fostering engagement but also giving rise to issues such as echo chambers, filter bubbles, and sensationalized content. While much attention has been devoted to the challenges posed by personalized discourse, this paper sheds light on a critical aspect that has been overlooked in regulatory paradigms: the erosion of an open, public sphere for discourse due to individualized...

Investor Coalitions Through an Antitrust Lens

Fri, 5 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This Article offers a novel—antitrust—perspective on a growing phenomenon in capital markets: institutional investor coalitions. In recent years, a large group of powerful institutional investors, who collectively own significant equity stakes in most public companies, have created alliances on various corporate governance issues. Traditionally, corporate law has encouraged investor cooperation on these issues, regarding it as the solution to the well-known collective-action problem facing shareholders in public companies. As this Article shows, however, the prevailing positive view underscores a crucial point: members of the coalition are not only co-owners of companies but also competitors in capital markets. In the primary markets, institutional investors are competing buyers of shares, vying for share allocation. In the secondary market, they compete as asset managers, using their portfolio performances to attract retail investors and sponsors. The concern raised in this...

Reevaluating Felon-in-Possession Laws After Bruen and the War on Drugs

Fri, 5 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The legal landscape surrounding firearm possession is evolving rapidly. In 2022, the Supreme Court accelerated its expansion of the individual right to bear arms under the Second Amendment in New York Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen. Since Bruen, courts around the country have struck down nearly all types of firearm regulations, with a notable exception: felon-in-possession laws. This Article examines the implications of a legal landscape where those who have prior felony convictions, and especially prior drug convictions, are punished harshly for the same behavior—possession of a firearm—that is constitutionally protected for nearly everyone else.

I argue that as the Second Amendment expands to protect more and more firearm possession, a dichotomy has arisen in which those who live in the communities most heavily targeted by the War on Drugs of the 1980s and 1990s are increasingly becoming virtually the only Americans for whom firearm possession is illegal. I examine...

Patient Autonomy, Public Safety, and Drivers with Cognitive Decline

Fri, 5 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

With a growing elderly population, cognitive decline in drivers has become a significant public safety concern. Currently, over thirty-two million individuals who are seventy or older have driver’s licenses, and that number is growing quickly. In addition, almost 10 percent of seniors in the United States (those sixty-five and older) have dementia, and an additional twenty-two percent have mild cognitive impairment. Between a quarter and a half of individuals with mild to moderate dementia still drive. As cognitive abilities such as memory, attention, and decision-making skills deteriorate, a driver’s ability to operate a vehicle safely can be compromised. This not only puts the driver at risk but also endangers passengers, other motorists, and pedestrians. As the population ages, the number of drivers experiencing cognitive decline is increasing, escalating the risk of accidents.

For many older adults, however, driving is a key aspect of independence and mobility. Losing...

Ethical Horizons: Navigating the Complexities of Team-Based Legal Representation in Large Corporate Firms

Fri, 5 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The legal profession requires the best of its members, asking them to act in ways that respect and prioritize the needs of clients, so long as those needs are ethical and legal. However, when an attorney works within a large law firm, they are faced with not only requirements from their clients, but also from their peers, supervisors, and client representatives. This Note focuses on (1) the origins and history of the large law firm structure that is so common today, (2) the ethics of practicing law in large law firms and how it impacts the individual, and (3) how to overcome ethical pitfalls common within the organizational structure. It concludes with a review of the literature that is most likely to find solutions to resolve these ethical dilemmas.

Rehabilitating the Nonprofit Arts Sector: Healthy Board Governance as a Condition to Federal Tax Exemption

Fri, 5 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Americans celebrate the arts and how they increase our economic and collective well-being. Nonprofit arts and culture organizations are the primary vehicle by which individuals create art, attend events, and support millions of jobs in the industry. This has led to a perception that arts organizations have an effective framework for productivity and efficiency. Yet, the COVID-19 pandemic uncovered tumultuous relationships between artists, staff, Board members, and executive leadership within several nonprofit arts organizations.

Although Americans regularly celebrate, support, and engage with the arts, the nonprofit arts industry is fraught with disconnected leaders, disgruntled staff and artists, and ineffective work environments. This Note explores why those issues persist and what can be done. First, I argue that the failures of nonprofit arts organizations’ Boards of Directors to uphold their responsibilities and manage stakeholder relationships are a key cause...

Patent Semiotics

Fri, 5 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Patent Semiotics

Foreword - Remembering Professor Dan L. Burk

Fri, 5 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Foreword - Remembering Professor Dan L. Burk

The Democratic Value of Transnational Campaign Finance

Fri, 5 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Democratic decision-making in the United States does not solely affect U.S. citizens. Indeed, many such decisions impact people living in other countries, as well as noncitizens residing within the United States. Decisions on U.S. policies regarding climate change, immigration, trade, and military aid—to name a few—can have major implications for the lives of many non-Americans. Yet, in being noncitizens, such people effectively have zero representation within the democratic process that results in these decisions. This phenomenon illustrates what has become known as the problem of “democratic externalities.”

Theorists have proffered multiple democratic frameworks to resolve this problem—e.g., democratic cosmopolitanism, deliberative democracy, and epistemic aggregative democracy. Ultimately, though, none have managed to adequately mitigate the issue of underrepresentation that democratic externalities produce. Accordingly, this Article considers an alternative, albeit...

Unpatenting Product Hops

Fri, 5 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

On July 9, 2021, President Joseph R. Biden signed Executive Order 14036 (“Promoting Competition in the American Economy”), which directed the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to collaborate on new approaches to increasing competition and lowering prices in the pharmaceutical marketplace. In response, the USPTO outlined several new initiatives, among them an intent to improve the robustness and reliability of issued patents.

A major impetus for the Executive Order was the pervasive nature of pharmaceutical product hopping, which occurs when manufacturers introduce new follow-on versions of lucrative pharmaceutical products to the market, versions of low added commercial value like extended-release forms of drugs, or modifications to device components of combination therapeutics. Product hops are usually intended to mitigate lost market share due to generic competition or thwart generic competition entirely....

Cover

Tue, 2 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Cover

Tue, 2 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Table of Contents

Mission Statement

Tue, 2 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Mission Statement

Masthead

Tue, 2 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Masthead

The Disparate Impact of the Coronavirus Pandemic on People of Color and the Efficacy of Race-Based Health Policies

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The coronavirus pandemic was, for all intents and purposes, a national emergency that highlighted the lack of quality healthcare for people of color and the overall lack of trust that communities of color, in general, have for medical professionals. In particular, Blacks, Latino/x, and Native Americans experienced higher hospitalization and death rates than White people. Part of the reason is because Black and Latino/x communities were overrepresented in essential service jobs during the pandemic, and these jobs did not allow for the ability to work from home. Other reasons stem from a lack of trust due to a history of discrimination in the medical field, lack of health insurance, and the quality of healthcare facilities in areas with diverse populations. Given the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on people of color, states like Utah, Minnesota, and New York, implemented race-based health policies to decrease the hospitalization and mortality rate among people of color, effectively...

Reliance and Reliability

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As we move toward full electrification for household uses, we will need to change the perspective of how we look at reliability and the reliance we have on our utilities. Current measures of reliability are utility-centric, focus on averages and may exclude large-scale events which cause widespread and long-duration outages. Averages are not good enough now (if they ever were). Excluding large events from reliability metrics drives specific utility behavior: restoring densely populated areas quickly to keep averages down, even if some customers in other areas or customers in pockets of more densely populated areas are left without service for days or weeks; discounting compounding harms from long-duration outages; and claiming that reliability is improving when the customer experience clearly is not. To adequately measure customer impact as we electrify everything, the perspective that we measure reliability from should not be that of the utility or of the regulator—but rather...

An Erie Taking: Tyler v. Hennepin County and the General Common Law Revival

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Tyler v. Hennepin County seemed unsurprising. But the Court’s opinion unabashedly adopted an approach to claims under the Takings Clause that looks to a general law of property, even when there was an available resolution resting on state law. This Article aims to elucidate the ways in which the Court’s opinion in Tyler effects a sea change in takings law. It also poses portentous questions about the effect the decision will have on the scope of the Takings Clause, the source of property law, and the viability of the general common law as a basis for rights claims in other areas of the Court’s jurisprudence.

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Table of Contents

Judicial Relief Isn’t Enough: How Federal Protection of Native American Cultural Landscapes Limit Religious Freedoms

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

“Political freedom cannot exist in any land where religion controls the state, and religious freedom cannot exist in any land where the state controls religion.” — Sen. Sam J. Ervin Jr.

Cover

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Cover

Vice Capital

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Academic and market interest in environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing has grown markedly in recent years. Although less prominent, a substantial literature also explores whether “sin pays” in the public capital markets. This literature’s underlying theory is that social norms discourage the funding of businesses that promote vice. According to this theory, some investors—particularly institutions sensitive to social norms, such as pension funds and foundations—will shun vice investments. A consequence of this aversion is a “vice premium” for those investors who will invest in such companies. Largely unexplored, however, is what industries or business models qualify as “vice,” how this definition is constructed and changes, how vice aversion affects startup corporate governance and finance, and what consequences vice aversion holds for the real economy. We address these gaps through a series of interviews with startup founders, venturecapital (VC) and angel investors,...

AI Artists on the Stand: Bias Against Artificial Intelligence-Generated Works in Copyright Law

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the creation of art, literature, and music—challenging the boundaries of intellectual property law. To date, scholars have primarily focused on AI’s authorship/entity status and the regulation of its use, overshadowing a critical issue: how AI’s involvement in creative processes influences legal judgments in copyright disputes. Our empirical research reveals systemic bias against AI-generated works in such legal matters. In our studies, participants read about a company that had hired either a human designer (condition one) or a generative AI art system (condition two) to produce works of art, and those works of art arguably infringed an existing copyright. Everything except for the identity of the hired creator (human vs. AI) was held constant, including the works of art: Participants saw identical works. The results showed that, when the works were produced by the AI (vs. the human), participants’ perception and behavior...

Masthead

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Masthead

Redressing the Harm of Accelerated Approval

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The accelerated approval pathway of the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) enables drugs to come to market more quickly than would be possible under a traditional FDA approval pathway. Accelerated approval is based upon the agency’s determination that changes in a surrogate or intermediate clinical endpoint are “reasonably likely” to predict a clinical benefit meaningful for patients. In essence, the pathway affords sick patients earlier access to potentially beneficial drugs while trials to confirm clinical benefit continue. Accelerated approval has been likened to a social compromise in which promising drugs enter the market sooner in exchange for a sponsor’s promise to undertake so-called confirmatory trials—that is, postmarketing trials to “verify and describe” the predicted clinical benefit. This Article argues that patients, too, are expected to engage in a compromise when they take drugs approved under the pathway: patients must accept the risk that a drug...

Mission Statement

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Mission Statement

Labor Strife and Peace