School of Law

The West Virginia University (WVU) Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) system was built between 1971 and 1975 in Morgantown, West Virginia to be a prototype transportation system of the future. Envisioned as a hybrid of public and automotive transportation, the fully automated cars deliver passengers directly to their destinations without stopping at intervening stations. The PRT concept may be familiar to STS scholars through Latour's study of Aramis, a PRT in Paris that was never completed. This article recounts a history with the opposite ending: the successful realization of a PRT in West Virginia. Our account supplements existing ones, which explain the construction of the WVUPRT primarily as the product of geography and politics. While not denying these factors, we carve out an explanatory role for another influence: a public narrative about the dangers of hitchhiking and crimes that might ensue from that practice. In weaving together that narrative with the history of the WVUPRT, we show how public narratives of crime authorize technological infrastructure.

The overall objective for HyperXite 9 was to design and build a more robust, and reliable pod, capable of proving the feasibility of a high-speed transportation system. We are working to improve a linear induction motor as the pod's propulsion system. We are also designing and implementing a thermal cooling system to actively dissipate the heat generated by this propulsion system. Our team is comprised of the following 7 subteams: Static Structures, Braking & Pneumatics, Dynamic Structures, Propulsion, Power Systems, Control Systems, and Outreach.

Abstract: In empirical research, eyewitnesses typically report their confidence numerically (e.g., “I'm 90% sure”). In contrast, in the field, lineup administrators typically ask witnesses to explain their confidence verbally, in the witness' own words (e.g., “I'm quite sure”). Across three studies, we explored how evaluators assess verbal confidence statements: both freely reported and reported using a graded verbal scale. Results showed wide variability in the interpretation of both kinds of confidence statements. Even when evaluating seemingly very strong statements of verbal confidence (e.g., “completely certain”) participants did not necessarily translate these statements into the strongest levels of numeric confidence. Variability in the interpretation of verbal confidence was particularly pronounced for low confidence statements. Moreover, participants preferred to report their confidence numerically rather than verbally. These results indicate the importance of documenting confidence verbatim at the time of the lineup so that the meaning of the witness' original confidence statement is preserved.

One of the most heated debates in psychological science concerns the concept of repressed memory. We discuss how the debate on repressed memories continues to surface in legal settings, sometimes even to suggest avenues of legal reform. In the past years, several European countries have extended or abolished the statute of limitations for the prosecution of sexual crimes. Such statutes force legal actions (e.g., prosecution of sexual abuse) to be applied within a certain period of time. One of the reasons for the changes in statutes of limitations concerns the idea of repressed memory. We argue that from a psychological standpoint, these law reforms can be detrimental, particularly when they are done to endorse unfounded psychological theories. The validity of testimonies is compromised many years after the alleged facts, and abolishing the statute of limitations increases the chance that even more (false) recovered memories of abuse might enter the courtroom. We propose solutions to these changes such as establishing an independent expert committee evaluating claims of sexual abuse.

Patents are legal delinquents. A growing body of empirical evidence demonstrates that patents repeatedly fail to fulfill the responsibilities they have been assigned in fostering innovation. But I argue here that in their moments of misbehavior, we can catch a glimpse of the social roles patents play when no one is watching. Drawing on insights from the sociology of markets, I argue that patents are surreptitiously performing functions familiar from the grocery store, the vegetable stand, or the barber shop. I suggest that patents are calculative, not in the mathematical sense, but in the sociological sense of structuring and facilitating market relations. This approach to discovering the social roles of patents opens the door to a new examination of patent purposes, and to understanding some otherwise inexplicable characteristics of patent law.

Patents, along with the related systems of utility models and plant breeders’ rights, are the forms of intellectual property most closely associated with technological innovation. Some form of patent system is found in essentially all modern states, and patents have become a ubiquitous feature of the global legal and technical environment. Patents and related rights are therefore highly dynamic areas of law, displaying constant evolution of doctrine simultaneously in multiple jurisdictions. The shifting diversity of national approaches offers an opportunity to consider how characteristic themes and problems of patent law have been approached from different perspectives, and lend a sense of better, worse, and alternative solutions to the problem of prompting technical innovation. Consequently, this chapter surveys particular doctrinal problems in patent law and allied laws, uses them to illustrate both broad theoretical issues endemic to such laws, and ties those issues to ongoing controversies that have attracted widespread interest.

Often, we ask: how can regulation mitigate risk? What might happen if instead we ask: what does regulation tell us about socially situated action? This article poses a thought experiment along these lines. The emerging conversation about regulation and the risks of mobile financial services has been relatively silent on a ubiquitous set of things people do with cash and coin not limited to the strictly economic functions of these media. Adding mobile into the mix of people's existing; highly complex monetary practices has the potential to create new risks -- but also new opportunities for product design and smarter regulation. This paper describes the social uses of mobile phones and cash from different cultural contexts, including proscriptions regarding the disclosure of certain transactions, and multi-person sharing of money and mobiles. It then reflects on how we might understand regulation as an account of people's practices and experiences, an account we might set alongside other forms of data on use cases for mobile and money. It argues that the risks identified by the regulators, rather than hindering innovation or frightening off developers, might instead inspire user-oriented solutions for mobile money, and for mobile money as part of, not a replacement for, the user's world of diverse social currencies.

How can we imagine and perform an anthropological practice with business, that is, not from a distanced perspective but through a mutual infolding and engagement? How might such an arrangement then be exemplary for novel economic experiments of the kind anthropologists often describe? Reflecting on several years' of collaborations with each other, the authors recount their relationship as an experiment in novel engagements with economic things (money, corporations, universities, accounting principles, computers, etc.) in an industrial and university site. The paper puts forward a theoretical argument about exaptive and nonadaptive plurality that opens new pathways for alternative and sometimes quite conventional values. The context is a specific set of projects around money and payment. The intellectual background is the anthropology of finance and alternative economies.

This book chapter proposes a typology of the different ways that domestic courts may use foreign law — as binding law, as a nonbinding norm, as an interpretive aid, as a basis for functional comparison, and as factual information — and it explores the implications of these different uses for judicial internalization of external norms. The chapter argues that domestic courts play a key role in transnational processes of norm internalization and diffusion, and it draws on political science scholarship to develop hypotheses about how different uses of foreign law by domestic courts affect these processes.