Notable &Quotable

If Trump wanted to purchase Greenland, Denmark wouldn’t be the most important party — the people of Greenland would be.

— Professors Joseph Blocher and Mitu Gulati note that the principle of self-determination — “the notion that peoples should be able to choose their sovereignty, rather than have it assigned to them” — is now a dominant consideration in transfers of sovereign territory. (Politico, Aug. 23, 2019)

We don’t yet have a sense of the violation we might feel on account of the widespread use of drones. … To protect the individual privacy that serves as an important backbone of our civil society, we should be sure that a much wider range of voices influence the decisions of our corporate boardrooms and public policy makers.

— Associate Clinical Professor Jeff Ward JD/LLM ’09, reacting to news that Amazon got a patent on a home surveillance drone, said that “surveillance capacity is so ubiquitous that perhaps only science fiction has suggested anything close.” (NPR, June 22, 2019)

I don’t think anyone is really trying to get single gene patents anymore. If the information is already out there — and most of the information about the human genome at a single-gene level is already out there — you can’t patent it because it’s no longer new.

— Professor Arti Rai, commenting on how the scientific and business landscapes have changed since the Supreme Court ruled, in 2013, in Association for Molecular Pathology (AMP) v. Myriad Genetics Inc. that human genes can’t be patented because they are a “product of nature.” (Science, June 2, 2019)

We had clear lines between ‘this is alive’ and ‘this is dead.’ How do we now think about this middle category of ‘partly alive’? We didn’t think it could exist.

— Professor Nita Farahany JD/MA ’04, PhD ’06, commenting on a study in which researchers successfully restored some cellular activity in brains removed — hours earlier — from slaughtered pigs. (The New York Times, April 17, 2019)

[These patients] went through internships, residencies, fellowships. They’re super informed. And even then, they’re not doing that much better.

— Professor Michael Frakes, co-author of a National Bureau of Economic Research study showing that physicians are no better than other patients in following their doctors’ orders and other medical guidelines for their own health care, thus challenging the idea that better informed patients make better decisions. (The Atlantic, July 9, 2019)

In my view, Hyatt is an unfortunate opinion — not just because some of its reasoning might be questioned, but because it makes the job of defending originalist doctrine harder. At the same time, though, it may have a silver lining: encouraging a slow, possibly generational shift in legal conservatives’ position on the common law.

— Professor Stephen Sachs, who co-authored an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in FTB v. Hyatt, disagreed with the Court’s decision to overrule Nevada v. Hall and declare that states have sovereign immunity in other states’ courts on structural, as opposed to textual, concerns. (Reason, May 13, 2019)