The conflict between work and family responsibilities remains a significant barrier to women’s equality in the American workplace. As many commentators have noted with envy, the United States stands apart from most European countries in its failure to give women a legal right to paid maternity leave. This Article argues that the United States’s potential for reconciling the work-family conflict is undermined by the predominance of antidiscrimination law. The unique trajectory of U.S. antidiscrimination law, designed to combat paternalism and gender stereotypes, has pushed family and medical leave into a single legal regime. But today, due to the costs and fears of abuse of sick leave, treating maternity the same as illness forecloses the possibility of gen erous maternity leave, leading to maternity leave that is grossly inadequate and medical leave that is easily abused. To expose this American idiosyncrasy, this Article develops a thorough comparative analysis of successful European models for work-family reconciliation. 

This book of Kafka's "office writings"--the memos and other documents that he wrote for his "day job" as a lawyer for a workmen's compensation agency--shows that Kafka was an excellent lawyer and bureaucrat and (as we knew) a very fine writer. On the larger questions whether and to what extent his office writings are continuous with his fiction, and his experiences as an insurance lawyer a source for that fiction, the editors' claims are not entirely convincing. It seems on the contrary that Kafka was able to separate his two very different vocations, as lawyer and as writer of fantastic fictions.

Federal agencies have long relied on animal studies to determine, at least preliminarily, whether or not a particular substance is carcinogenic. The important question is: Should those studies be admissible in court? Seventeen years ago Daubert provided courts with a framework for answering that question, and the answer has, in most cases, been “no.” Some courts, however, have carved out an exception for the place where agencies and courts collide. Where an agency (specifically, the Environmental Protection Agency) has relied on animal studies in order to designate a substance as “carcinogenic,” courts have admitted those studies, even where they would not have if the study had been conducted by a private party. This Note argues that this approach is a mistake. 

Nonpracticing entities (NPEs) are firms that rarely or never practice their patents, and instead focus on earning licensing fees. NPEs may have patented inventions on their own or bought the patents from other inventors. NPEs, labeled "patents trolls" by critics, have been the subject of much controversy over the past few years. This Note uses patent data from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) and infringement litigation information from Stanford Law School’s Intellectual Property Litigation Clearinghouse (IPLC) to test some of the arguments made for and against NPEs and to determine whether these firms benefit or harm innovation.

This Note considers the constitutionality of state statutes establishing procedures that a criminal defendant must fulfill in order to assert his Sixth Amendment right to confront laboratory analysts who have prepared forensic reports introduced into evidence against him. These statutes—commonly known as “notice-and-demand” statutes—have become increasingly important in light of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, holding that in order to introduce a laboratory report into evidence, the prosecution must make the technician who prepared the report available at trial for the purpose of cross-examination. Building on dicta in Melendez-Diaz suggesting that at least some notice-and-demand statutes are constitutional, this Note argues that the Court should take states’ interests into account when assessing the validity of these statutes. Finally, this Note urges the Court to recognize the important connection between substance and procedure, and to develop a framework for determining which state-imposed procedures impermissibly undercut the strong right to confrontation first established in Crawford v. Washington and most recently confirmed in Melendez-Diaz.