The International Trade Commission: Potential Bias, Hold-Up, and the Need for Reform

The International Trade Commission (ITC) is an alternate venue for holders of U.S. patents to pursue litigation against infringing products produced abroad and imported to the United States. Because the ITC may only grant injunctive relief, it has awarded injunctions in situations where there may have been better and more efficient remedies to the infringement available through litigation in federal district court. The increased likelihood of injunctive relief bolsters the position of patent holders against a wide range of producers in royalty negotiations and can harm the end consumers through a process known as patent hold-up. There are currently sweeping and aggressive proposed reforms to reduce this harm to consumers. This iBrief suggests that the optimal reforms would not change the overall structure or scope of the ITC or its jurisdiction. Rather it would harmonize the substantive law, available defenses for respondents, and requirements for injunctive relief between ITC proceedings and litigation in federal district court

Identity Crisis: The Post-WWII Reconstruction of the City of London

In a single night in December 1940, German bombs reduced more than a third of Britain’s most historic square mile to blackened rubble, destroying countless architectural treasures and inexorably altering the City of London’s character. In this immense devastation postwar planners saw a unique opportunity to reinvent the Empire’s ancient cultural and financial hub as a soaring modern metropolis. Through examination of original planning proposals and public opinions expressed in the era’s journalism, this thesis attempts to explain why the City’s postwar architecture — initially lauded by the public for its striking modernity — soon became so unpopular that it initiated a cycle of redevelopment that continues to this day. Ultimately this thesis argues that dissatisfaction with the City’s postwar architecture mirrors Britain’s ongoing postwar identity crisis. With its loss of empire and position on the world stage, Britain is left with an economic center and nostalgia for the past.Histor

Unmasking History: Who Was Behind the Anti-Mask League Protests During the 1918 Influenza Epidemic in San Francisco?

On April 17, 2020, San Francisco Mayor London Breed did something that had not been done for 101 years. She issued an order that face masks be worn in public as a measure to help prevent the spread of infectious disease in the midst of a pandemic. This act promptly raised questions about how things were handled a century ago. The media soon picked up on the antics of an “Anti-Mask League” that was formed in San Francisco to protest this inconvenience, noting some historical parallels with public complaint about government overreach. This essay dives deeper into the historical context of the anti-mask league to uncover more information about the identity and possible motivations of those who organized these protests. In particular it shines light on the fascinating presence of the leading woman in the campaign—lawyer, suffragette, and civil rights activist, Mrs. E.C. Harrington

Gauge Symmetry in Background Charge Conformal Field Theory

We present a mechanism to construct four-dimensional charged massless Ramond states using the discrete states of a fivebrane Liouville internal conformal field theory. This conformal field theory has background charge, and admits an inner product which allows positive norm states. A connection among supergravity soliton solutions, Liouville conformal field theory, non-critical string theory and their gauge symmetry properties is given. A generalized construction of the SU(2) super Kac-Moody algebra mixing with the N=1 super Virasoro algebra is analyzed. How these Ramond states evade the DKV no-go theorem is explained.Comment: 20 pages, plain Tex, no figures, published versio