In memoriam: Professor Kathryn R. Heidt

What is most notable about the life and the career of Professor Kathryn R. Heidt is not that it was tragically cut short by her death on May 24, 2005, but that she was able to achieve so much, both personally and professionally, in the too-brief time allotted to her. After receiving her bachelor’s degree from Penn State and her J.D. from Cleveland State College of Law, Professor Heidt clerked for two years for the Honorable John T. Patton of the Ohio Court of Appeals before becoming an associate with the Philadelphia law firm Duane Morris & Heckscher. Opting for a change in her path in the law, she obtained an LL.M. from Yale Law School and began her distinguished academic career. Before joining the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh as a Professor of Law in 1995, Professor Heidt had served on the law faculty at Wayne State University Law School, and had been a visiting faculty member of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, the University of North Carolina School of Law, New York Law School, and the Law Faculty of the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands.\u

THE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE OF THE CISG (AND OTHER UNIFORM COMMERCIAL LAW INITIATIVES)

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31st Annual Meeting and Associated Programs of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC 2016) : part two

Background The immunological escape of tumors represents one of the main ob- stacles to the treatment of malignancies. The blockade of PD-1 or CTLA-4 receptors represented a milestone in the history of immunotherapy. However, immune checkpoint inhibitors seem to be effective in specific cohorts of patients. It has been proposed that their efficacy relies on the presence of an immunological response. Thus, we hypothesized that disruption of the PD-L1/PD-1 axis would synergize with our oncolytic vaccine platform PeptiCRAd. Methods We used murine B16OVA in vivo tumor models and flow cytometry analysis to investigate the immunological background. Results First, we found that high-burden B16OVA tumors were refractory to combination immunotherapy. However, with a more aggressive schedule, tumors with a lower burden were more susceptible to the combination of PeptiCRAd and PD-L1 blockade. The therapy signifi- cantly increased the median survival of mice (Fig. 7). Interestingly, the reduced growth of contralaterally injected B16F10 cells sug- gested the presence of a long lasting immunological memory also against non-targeted antigens. Concerning the functional state of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), we found that all the immune therapies would enhance the percentage of activated (PD-1pos TIM- 3neg) T lymphocytes and reduce the amount of exhausted (PD-1pos TIM-3pos) cells compared to placebo. As expected, we found that PeptiCRAd monotherapy could increase the number of antigen spe- cific CD8+ T cells compared to other treatments. However, only the combination with PD-L1 blockade could significantly increase the ra- tio between activated and exhausted pentamer positive cells (p= 0.0058), suggesting that by disrupting the PD-1/PD-L1 axis we could decrease the amount of dysfunctional antigen specific T cells. We ob- served that the anatomical location deeply influenced the state of CD4+ and CD8+ T lymphocytes. In fact, TIM-3 expression was in- creased by 2 fold on TILs compared to splenic and lymphoid T cells. In the CD8+ compartment, the expression of PD-1 on the surface seemed to be restricted to the tumor micro-environment, while CD4 + T cells had a high expression of PD-1 also in lymphoid organs. Interestingly, we found that the levels of PD-1 were significantly higher on CD8+ T cells than on CD4+ T cells into the tumor micro- environment (p < 0.0001). Conclusions In conclusion, we demonstrated that the efficacy of immune check- point inhibitors might be strongly enhanced by their combination with cancer vaccines. PeptiCRAd was able to increase the number of antigen-specific T cells and PD-L1 blockade prevented their exhaus- tion, resulting in long-lasting immunological memory and increased median survival

Conformity of Goods, Third Party Claims, and Buyer’s Notice of Breach under the United Nations Sales Convention ( CISG ), with Comments on the Mussels Case, the Stolen Automobile Case, and the Ugandan Used Shoes Case

This paper, which derives from comments delivered at a 2006 conference held at Istanbul (Turkey) Bilgi University, gives an overview of Part III, Chapter II, Section II of the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods ( CISG ). This portion of the Convention encompasses provisions addressing a number of critical issues, including the seller’s obligations concerning the quality (Article 35), title (Article 41) and intellectual property aspects (Article 42) of goods sold in a transaction governed by the CISG, as well as a buyer’s obligations to inspect delivered goods and to give notice of their failure to conform to those seller’s obligations (Articles 38 – 40 and 43-44). Included are extensive comments on three significant German cases that have applied these provisions of the Convention – the “Mussels Case” (decision of the Bundesgerichtshof, 8 March 1995, English translation available at http://cisgw3.law.pace.edu/cases/950308g3.html), the “Stolen Automobile Case” (decision of the Bundesgerichtshof, 11 January 2006, English translation available at http://cisgw3.law.pace.edu/cases/060111g1.html) and the “Ugandan Used Shoes Case” (decision of the Landgericht Frankfurt,11 April 2005, English translation available at http://cisgw3.law.pace.edu/cases/050411g1.html). This paper concludes that the Mussels Case is a good (but not perfect) example of a court complying with the Convention’s mandate to interpret the CISG from an international perspective and with the goal of maintaining international uniformity in its interpretation. The assessment of the Stolen Automobile Case in light of these factors is more mixed. The analysis of the Ugandan Used Shoes Case concludes that the court ignored those criteria, badly misinterpreted the provisions of the Convention, and perpetrated a gross miscarriage of justice

Nominating Manfred Forberich: The Worst CISG Decision in 25 Years?

The co-authors propose awarding a Razzie\u27 award for the worst decision on the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods ( CISG ) to the U.S. (federal) district court decision in Raw Materials Inc. v. Manfred Forberich GmbH. We argue the Razzie is deserved because of the decision\u27s bald-faced violation of the interpretational methodology required (as a matter of U.S. treaty obligations) in approaching the CISG - specifically, its use of U.S. domestic law as a guide to interpreting the Convention, in clear violation of the requirement in CISG Article 7(1) that the treaty be interpreted from an international perspective and with a view to maintaining uniform application wherever the Convention is appli8ed. The co-authors had previously outlined certain criteria for assessing the \u27precedential value\u27 of individual CISG decisions rendered by national courts; in this piece we combine our criteria in a short-list of five points (Section 2). On that basis, we explain why we would nominate the recent Forberich decision for the dubious worse-case distinction (Section 3). We argue for the nomination despite the stiff competition at the bottom of the CISG barrel, and despite the fact that the Manfred Forberich decision is no \u27shoo-in\u27 in light of how the case might have been decided if better (more persuasive) reasoning had been applied (Section 4). Lastly, we discuss how the more serious aspects of our (tongue-in-cheek) exercise might be of relevance for legal educators and the future practice of CISG law in the courts