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

Featured Herbarium: BUT—The Friesner Herbarium of Butler University

Feature written by Rebecca Dolan on the BUT—The Friesner Herbarium of Butler University in the Vasculum

The intrinsic curvature of thermodynamic potentials for black holes with critical points

The geometry of thermodynamic state space is studied for asymptotically anti-de Sitter black holes in D-dimensional space times. Convexity of thermodynamic potentials and the analytic structure of the response functions is analysed. The thermodynamic potentials can be used to define a metric on the space of thermodynamic variables and two commonly used such metrics are the Weinhold metric, derived from the internal energy, and the Ruppeiner metric, derived from the entropy. The intrinsic curvature of these metrics is calculated for charged and for rotating black holes and it is shown that the curvature diverges when heat capacities diverge but, contrary to general expectations, the singularities in the Ricci scalars do not reflect the critical behaviour. When a cosmological constant is included as a state space variable it can be interpreted as a pressure and the thermodynamically conjugate variable as a thermodynamic volume. The geometry of the resulting extended thermodynamic state space is also studied, in the context of rotating black holes, and there are curvature singularities when the heat capacity at constant angular velocity diverges and when the black hole is incompressible. Again the critical behaviour is not visible in the singularities of the thermodynamic Ricci scalar.Comment: 35 pages, 3 figure