News featuring a faculty member
After the Department of Justice charged 16 people with illegally voting in the last election, ABC 7 in Chicago turned to Professor Jason Mazzone for context. “There’s really no evidence that there are large numbers of people voting, who are not supposed to be voting,” Mazzone said on the broadcast. The charges, if proven to be true, for 16 out of 154 million people who voted in the election represents 0.0000001 percent of the total, which Mazzone described as “essentially zero fraud.”
In a new article, Professor Bill Watson and co-author Nina Varsava examine the ways in which originalists have shown a tendency to espouse a general-law theory of constitutional rights. This change in the direction of originalist arguments, they write in Northwestern University Law Review, makes judicial decisions more dependent on moral reasoning, which more closely aligns with non-originalist approaches. “This general-law turn pulls originalists back to the question they started with,” the paper concludes. “Namely, how should judges adjudicate constitutional disputes?”
Corteva Inc. v. Inari Agriculture Inc. was a closely watched case in the world of biological materials patents. When it ended in a settlement, however, it was a missed opportunity for the courts to come to a ruling on patents for plant varieties. Speaking with Bloomberg, Professor Jacob Sherkow explained that Inari’s decision to settle and place biological materials it obtained into a repository might make similar deals more appealing in future cases. ““You can deposit and get your patents without worrying that everyone will just design around,” he said.
Reporting on the Senate approving a bill to permanently raise debt limits for bankruptcy relief, Bloomberg spoke to Professor Robert Lawless about how this could benefit individuals entering bankruptcy. Lawless noted how the change would help personal bankruptcy filers, as mortgage debt had been a big factor limiting options for individuals in high-cost areas. “Home prices had gone up higher than inflation,” Lawless said. “People were getting mortgage debts that were taking them outside of Chapter 13.”
On September 25, Professor Arden Rowell presented on how to regulate emerging technologies, like AI, at the Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington University. She was part of two panels, one on designing adaptive regulation and frameworks and another on regulation of emerging technology; she also submitted a working paper as part of the event.
Professor Sam Limentato ’94 was interviewed on the WDWS program “A Penny for Your Thoughts” in August. As part of his discussion with host Brian Barnhart, he spoke about his role as lecturer and senior associate director of the Anderson Center as well as his perspective as a former Illinois Circuit Judge. Limentato also answered calls from guests about the law and his experience.
Professor Robin Kar recently published a co-authored article in CHI, the #1 journal for Human-Computer Interaction. The article, “Living Contracts: Beyond Document-Centric Interaction with Legal Agreements,” explores a future where contracts educate users on legal rights not in the contract, transform legal language to help understanding, and proactively supply contractual information as needed; the authors refer to these interfaces as living contracts.
“You can imagine some really drastic scenarios in which, for example, federal officers think that there’s some funny business going on, and they decide to seize ballots or make arrests. That would be tremendously disruptive of the midterm elections,” Professor Jason Mazzone told ABC 7 while discussing a hypothetical future in which Department of Justice election monitors cause more trouble than they prevent. His remarks came as part of a segment on the Trump administration’s plans to deploy monitors during the midterm election.
Recently, several states have enacted laws to provide redress in state courts for persons who have suffered violations of federal constitutional rights at the hands of federal officials. A new version of this law, from California, avoids some of the mistakes of previous efforts in states like Illinois, as Professors Jason Mazzone and Vikram Amar write in an article on Justia Verdict. However, the law includes an “unhelpful blend of the serious and the theatrical, in which the latter often obscures the former and thus distracts from what should be a careful and civil conversation about helpful legal innovations that actually might matter.”
In the Summer/Fall 2026 issue of “The Learning Curve,” published by AALS, Professor Michael Loch shared an article on how to increase focus on how students learn. Centered around Hermann Ebbinghaus’s forgetting curve, the article details why individuals forget things and how law schools can help their students overcome the nature of forgetting to maximize success.