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In The Colorado River Ecosystem v. State of Colorado, plaintiff asked a federal district court to find that the Colorado River ecosystem is a legal person, arguing that, “[t]he dominance of a culture that defines nature as property enables its destruction.” Plaintiff’s principal claim rested on the assumption that legal personality could do something for the river that a system of property cannot. In making its case, plaintiff relied on the emergence of what it called a “new kind of environmental law,” pointing to examples where nature had been extended elements of personhood by courts and legislatures in India, New Zealand, Ecuador and Colombia. In this essay, we evaluate the basic strategy of claiming personhood for the Colorado River and other natural objects as a way to advance environmental goals in the legal domain. We explore the normative foundation of the claim — elements of nature are legal persons — and the work personhood is being asked to do by plaintiff and other environmental activists. We identify three possibilities: procedural, substantive and rhetorical. Of those, we suggest plaintiff’s strongest case is rhetorical. But we say this not only because it will likely be difficult to convince a judge to extend standing or substantive rights to a natural object, but because we are unconvinced that personhood would achieve the ends desired by plaintiff and other rights of nature advocates. We contrast the rights of nature movement cases with strategies used by plaintiffs in another case, Juliana v. the US, and conclude that existing legal tools rooted in the law of property offer a more certain, and therefore more promising, pathway to achieving many of the goals articulated by rights of nature advocates in the United States.

Two experiments investigated how well bilinguals utilize long-standing semantic associations to encode and retrieve semantic clusters in verbal episodic memory. In Experiment 1, Spanish-English bilinguals (N = 128) studied and recalled word and picture sets. Word recall was equivalent in L1 and L2, picture recall was better in L1 than in L2, and the picture superiority effect was stronger in L1 than in L2. Semantic clustering in word and picture recall was equivalent in L1 and L2. In Experiment 2, Spanish-English bilinguals (N = 128) and English-speaking monolinguals (N = 128) studied and recalled word sequences that contained semantically related pairs. Data were analyzed using a multinomial processing tree approach, the pair-clustering model. Cluster formation was more likely for semantically organized than for randomly ordered word sequences. Probabilities of cluster formation, cluster retrieval, and retrieval of unclustered items did not differ across languages or language groups. Language proficiency has little if any impact on the utilization of long-standing semantic associations, which are language-general.

In Continental Paper Bag Co. v. Eastern Paper Bag Co., the Supreme Court, held (among other things) (1) that patent owners have an absolute right not to practice their patent and (2) that even these non practicing patent owners are entitled to the liberal use of injunctive relief against infringers. Both of these holdings have been very important to the viability of patent assertion entities, or so-called "patent trolls." In eBay Inc. v. MercExchange, LLC, the Supreme Court softened the injunction rule. In this essay, we argue that Congress or the Court should also reconsider Continental Paper Bag’s endorsement of a robust right not to use, not because patents are not property but because the considerations at work within both property and patent law do not support recognizing such an absolute right not to use patents. The Court's endorsement in Continental Paper Bag of a robust right not to use patents was based on an overly simplistic analogy to tangible property, which the Court characterized as recognizing "the privilege of any owner of property to use or not use it, without question of motive." The Court's reasoning was flawed in two respects. First, the law of tangible property distinguishes among nonusers, penalizing owners whose derelict nonuse interferes with other owners’ use of their own property or induces others to waste time or effort appropriating the unused property. With respect to these derelict nonusers, the law employs numerous doctrines, such as nuisance, abandonment, adverse possession, and permissive waste, to ensure that owners' decision not to use their property does not inflict harm on others. Second, beyond its poor understanding of the law of nonuse as it relates to tangible property, the Court in Continental Paper Bag failed to consider the ways in which the reasons for recognizing a right not to use might differ in the contexts of patent and tangible property. Although the same basic considerations are at play in both contexts -- efficiency, autonomy, and personhood -- the implications of nonuse differ in the patent context because of information's nonrivalrous nature and because of the particularly powerful way that patent law constrains the freedom of nonowners. Taking these factors into account suggests that the normative case for recognizing a robust right not to use a patent is weaker than in the domain of tangible property. This is especially true when nonusing owners attempt to enforce their patents against independent inventors. As a consequence, in cases brought against independent inventors, we suggest making patent remedies contingent on a patent owner’s efforts to disseminate their inventions. Recognition of such an obligation to use in patents would significantly reduce the threats posed by so-called patent trolls and the high tech patent wars.

The debate over the proper role of religion in public life has raged on for decades and shows little signs of slowing down. Proponents of restrictive accounts of public reason have proceeded under the assumption that religious and deep moral disagreement constitutes a threat to social stability that must be tamed. In contrast to this "scary story" linking pluralism with the threat of instability, there exists within political theory a competing, "happy story" according to which pluralism affirmatively contributes to stability by creating incentives for groups to moderate their demands. Whether the scary story or happy story is a more accurate reflection of our reality is a difficult empirical question, but one that ought to matter a great deal to discussions of public reason. Acting as if the scary story were true when the happy story is in fact operating will lead proponents of public reason to stifle the healthful effects of robust pluralism, degrading the quality of public deliberation and ultimately undermining stability. In other words, if the happy story turns out to be the right one, restrictive accounts of public reason may turn out to be counterproductive, hastening the very deliberative and social harms they aim to forestall.

The incidence and prognostic significance of positive intraperitoneal cytology taken during a radical hysterectomy was reviewed. A prospective study looking at intraperitoneal cytology was conducted by using 400 consecutive radical hysterectomies from January 1988 through June 1996. All selected patients had peritoneal washings performed prior to a radical hysterectomy with pelvic and para-aortic lymphadenectomy. A single pathologist reviewed all cytological and histologic specimens. A total of 400 patients were included in the study. Only 7 of 400 (1.8%) had positive intraperitoneal cytology. Four had squamous cell cancer and 3 had adenocarcinoma. Five had stage IB cervical cancer and the remainder were stage IIA. Three had positive nodes. Six of 7 had tumor size greater than 3 cm. Three of 7 had >50% invasion and 2 of 7 had lymphovascular space invasion. No other risk factors were present in these specimens. Six of 7 recurred within 18 months of surgery. Recurrences were local or retroperitoneal; none were upper abdomen or intraperitoneal. The incidence of positive peritoneal cytology during radical hysterectomy is 1.8%. The cost of these cytology specimens did not offer an advantage to the current surgical–pathological factors used to determine prognosis and adjuvant therapy.

Much of the popular outcry against the Supreme Court's decision in Kelo v. New London can be understood in terms of the public's commitment to the conception of the home as a castle. This familiar metaphor is typically viewed as aligned with libertarian conceptions of property and of the right to exclude. Taken to its logical conclusion, the metaphor's connotation of an owner's "absolute dominion" would seem to rule out the exercise of eminent domain altogether. A different understanding of the castle metaphor is possible, however, one rooted in notions of the dignity of home ownership. While such a dignitary understanding of the home as the castle remains true to the intuitions underlying the metaphor, it yields a far more flexible stance towards eminent domain.

BACKGROUND Cancer cell growth is an energy-related process supported by an increased glucose metabolism. The objective of this study was to investigate the association of GLUT-1 with response to chemotherapy and outcome in patients with ovarian carcinoma. METHODS Histologic sections of formalin fixed, paraffin embedded specimens from 113 primary ovarian carcinomas were stained for GLUT-1 by using polyclonal GLUT-1 antibody (Dako Co., Carpinteria, CA) and the labeled streptavidin biotin procedure. Intensity of GLUT-1 staining was compared with disease free survival (DFS), chemotherapy response, and other clinicopathologic characteristics. RESULTS GLUT-1 cytoplasmic membrane staining was observed in 89 of 104 (85.6%) malignant tumors. Poorly differentiated tumors showed a trend to overexpress the GLUT-1 protein compared with the more differentiated counterparts (27.6% vs. 8.7%; P = 0.08). Patients who experienced a complete clinical response to chemotherapy were more frequently GLUT-1 positive than GLUT-1 negative (80% vs. 51.5%; P = 0.036). In multivariate analysis of advanced stage disease, residual tumor (P = 0.0001) and high GLUT-1 expression levels (P = 0.028) were the only independent variables that maintained a significant association with response to chemotherapy (P = 0.0001; chi-square = 38.13). In the subgroup of Stage III–IV (International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics patients showing a complete clinical response, GLUT-1 overexpression was associated with a shorter DFS. The median time to progression was 30 months in GLUT-1 strongly positive cases (> 50% of cancer cells positive) versus 60 months in GLUT-1 weakly positive cases (≤ 50% of cancer cells positive; P = 0.024). CONCLUSIONS GLUT-1 status is an independent prognostic factor of response to chemotherapy in advanced stage ovarian carcinoma. Moreover, patients overexpressing GLUT-1 show a significantly shorter DFS. These results suggest that the assessment of GLUT-1 status may provide clinically useful prognostic information in patients with ovarian carcinoma. Cancer 2001;92:1144–50. © 2001 American Cancer Society.

From 1965 to 1995, at the University of Miami/Jackson Memorial Medical Center, 1223 patients with stage IA2, IB, or IIA cervical cancer have undergone a radical hysterectomy. The charts of these patients were reviewed retrospectively for pathology reports showing positive or close surgical margins. Fifty-one of these cases had final pathology results interpreted as close vaginal margins (CVM), which we define as tumor less than or equal to 0.5 cm from the vaginal margins of resection. All slides of blocks with close vaginal margins were found and reviewed by a single pathologist. Twenty-eight (54.9%) had parametrial involvement or positive lymph nodes and received adjuvant radiation therapy (RT). Of the remaining 23 cases, only 6 had other high risk factors, tumor greater than 4 cm, poorly differentiated, greater than 50% invasion, or lymphovascular space involvement. Sixteen of 23 received radiation. The 5-year survival was significantly greater with RT, 81.3%, than without RT, 28.6% (P < 0.05). The recurrence rate was also decreased from 85.7 to 12.5% (P < 0.01). Although present in less than 2% of radical hysterectomy specimens, CVM without other high risk factors may be an important prognostic variable that should be considered when making adjuvant therapy decisions.