INTRODUCTION On 8 June 2017, the Supreme Court in the United Kingdom rejected a legal appeal in the high-profile case of Charlie Gard, a British infant with a severe genetic disorder whose parents had disagreed with medical professionals and were requesting treatment that the doctors believed was futile. The case was the latest in a series of UK legal cases where courts have authorized withdraw...

On the face of it, the 5 June ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, affirming the earlier dismissal of the youths’ case, is a setback. However, the Court’s ruling positions the case to proceed to the Supreme Court on the question of whether the federal government has a public trust obligation to its citizens. The Court of Appeals focused on a recent U.S. Supr...

All states and the District of Columbia have passed sex offender registration and community notification laws. While the specific provisions of these statutes vary, all have public safety as a primary goal. The authors discuss two recent cases heard by the United States Supreme Court that challenged the constitutionality of Alaska's and Connecticut's statutes. The laws were challenged as violat...

Rationality is explicit in the United States Supreme Court's Dusky standard but not in most U.S. CST standards. It is hard to imagine that the legal purposes of competency to stand trial (CST) determinations are served if a defendant's understanding of the proceedings is irrational (e.g., delusional or psychotically confused) or if the defendant cannot consult rationally with counsel. Most insa...

F or more than a decade, there has been an intense debate about the ethics and legality of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide (PAS) in the United States. In June 1997, the US Supreme Court unanimously ruled that there is neither a constitutional right nor a constitutional prohibition to euthanasia or PAS. This permitted Oregon to experiment with legalizing PAS. During this decade, most o...

BY DANIEL J. SOLOVE T he U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in United States v. Jones, No. 10-1259 (U.S. Jan. 23, 2012) is a profound decision in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence as well as in privacy law more generally. In this case, FBI agents installed a global positioning system (GPS) tracking device on Jones’s car and monitored where he drove for a month without a warrant. Antoine Jones ch...

With its landmark Jackson v. Indiana (406 U.S. 715 (1972)) decision, the United States Supreme Court ruled that states may not indefinitely confine criminal defendants solely on the basis of incompetence to stand trial. While this decision led to widespread state statutory and procedural changes, the Jackson court left unresolved whether states could indefinitely maintain criminal charges again...

The right to represent oneself at trial is well-established, but not absolute. Recently, in Indiana v. Edwards, the United States Supreme Court considered whether states may demand a higher standard of competence for criminal defendants seeking to represent themselves at trial than that necessary for standing trial with attorney representation. Ultimately, the Court ruled that the Constitution ...

Extracts and compounds of natural products have potential as alternatives to current Western medicines. However, these products may not be patentable under the statutory requirements because of their naturally-occurring nature. This article analyzes the current patenting practices for natural products in the United States, particularly in light of the recent Supreme Court ruling in Myriad, and ...