Utah has introduced a first-in-the-nation pilot program that allows AI to independently renew certain prescriptions for patients with chronic conditions. The 12-month initiative, which launched in January 2026, uses an AI system developed by the health tech company Doctronic, and operates under a special state “regulatory sandbox” designed to test emerging technologies. A New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) article, authored by Sara Gerke, Ravi B. Parikh, and I. Glenn Cohen, raises serious questions about its efficacy and legality.

Following the Supreme Court decision in Chiles v. Salazar, which found that a Colorado law banning conversion therapy for minors violated the First Amendment rights of therapists, Professor Robin Fretwell Wilson co-authored an op-ed (with Utah state legislator Mike Petersen) for Deseret News.

Following oral arguments in Trump v. Barbara, most legal experts agreed that although the Supreme Court will most likely decide against the government, the justices’ treatment of the Trump administration’s position lends it respectability and could ultimately allow Congress to return to the question of birthright citizenship.

A new bill pending in the Utah State Legislature would allow students to opt out of coursework that conflicts with their religious beliefs. Critics of the bill are concerned about infringement on academic freedom, but Professor Robin Fretwell Wilson, who helped craft the legislation, believes the bill will function as a mechanism for faculty to more carefully consider the experience of their students when creating assignments. She argued that “a public battle—or a student quietly suffering moral discomfort
—is less likely if there’s a process in place to handle these types of student objections.”

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign presents the Campus Awards for Excellence in Faculty Leadership each year to distinguished faculty who enrich the intellectual vitality of the university and the broader community. The awards were presented in three categories — faculty mentoring, distinguished executive officer and outstanding faculty leadership — to five faculty members during a ceremony hosted by the Office of the Provost on campus in March.

Professor Jason Mazzone joined Professor Vikram Amar in his “Brothers in Law” series for SCOTUSblog, written with his brother, Professor Akhil Amar of Yale Law School, to examine the ways in which President Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship is unconstitutional. The article goes beyond the text of the 14th Amendment, and examines the Supreme Court’s landmark 1898 decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark as well as the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, both of which support the amendment and represent decades of settled case law. Their work was also quoted in a National Review editorial that predicts a supermajority will invalidate the executive order.

“There are few cases that are more important than this one,” Professor Jason Mazzone told the Chicago Tribune about the United States Supreme Court’s case deciding the constitutionality of President Donald Trump’s attempt to restrict birthright citizenship. In an extensive article about how the end of birthright citizenship would affect those in Chicago, Mazzone told the Tribune the Court must rule the effort unconstitutional. “If you read the president’s executive order and you match it to the language of the 14th Amendment I think most people will see the flat contradiction between those two texts,” he said.

Professor Jacob Sherkow has extensive scholarship in the area of patents and has been cited as an expert many times on the issue of drug labels being used in patent cases. In the case of Hikma Pharmaceuticals USA Inc. v. Amarin Pharma Inc., currently before the United States Supreme Court, Sherkow has authored an amicus brief with Professor Paul R. Gugliuzza of the University of Texas at Austin School of Law. The brief is written in support of neither party, but urges the court to discontinue allowing this practice of “infringement by label.”

In a settlement deal over claims Moderna infringed upon patents owned by Roviant in its COVID-19 vaccine, Moderna has agreed to pay up to $2.25 billion. The settlement, however, has a unique structure in which Moderna will pay $950 million up front and then another $1.3 million if an appeal to have parts of its liability offloaded to the federal government fail. “This was a case that should have settled at the very beginning,” Sherkow told STAT. “There was never any real dispute that Moderna was infringing. It was just a matter of coming up with a number that was mutually acceptable.”

Professor Arden Rowell was part of an interdisciplinary team of University of Illinois researchers raising concerns about a proposed rule that could reduce environmental oversight for advanced nuclear reactors. The group submitted a public comment to the U.S. Department of Energy about a rule that would allow certain advanced reactor activities—including siting, construction, operation, and decommissioning—to proceed without standard environmental reviews. The team concluded the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission should not adopt the Department of Energy’s characterization of advanced reactors as technologies that normally have no significant environmental impacts.