Pope Francis’s Statement Endorsing Same-Sex Civil Unions Undermines the Moral Legitimacy and Legal Arguments in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia

DAVID S. KEMP, CHARLES E. BINKLEY

David S. Kemp, a professor at Berkeley Law, and Charles E. Binkley, MD, the director of bioethics at Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, consider the implications of Pope Francis’s recently revealed statement endorsing same-sex civil unions as they pertain to a case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court. Kemp and Binkley argue that the Pope’s statement undermines the moral legitimacy of the Catholic organization’s position and casts a shadow on the premise of its legal arguments.

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Stigma and the Oral Argument in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia

LESLIE C. GRIFFIN

UNLV Boyd School of Law professor Leslie C. Griffin explains why stigma is a central concept that came up during oral argument before the Supreme Court in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia. Griffin points out that some religions have long supported racial discrimination, citing their religious texts, but courts prohibited such discrimination, even by religious entities. Griffin argues that just as religious organizations should not enjoy religious freedom to stigmatize people of color, so they should not be able to discriminate—and thus stigmatize—people based on sexual orientation.

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Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. University of Wyoming Research Corp.

Docket: 19-1530

Opinion Date: November 4, 2020

Judge: Alvin Anthony Schall

Areas of Law: Intellectual Property, Patents

The University of Wyoming’s 425 patent is directed to a procedure whereby solvents of increasing strength are successively passed over asphaltenes that have been segregated in a packed column from a hydrocarbon such as oil and amounts of asphaltenes dissolved and eluted from the column by the various solvents yield information about the oil. Chevron was also studying the analysis of asphaltene impurities in crude oil. Wyoming initiated an interference by copying into its pending application claims from a pending Chevron application. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board held that Wyoming’s 425 patent had an adequate written description for the count limitation and held that Wyoming was entitled to the benefit of the earlier filing dates of two patent applications, Because Chevron had filed a Priority Statement that indicated its earliest corroborated conception coupled with diligence date was March 1, 2009, the Board determined that Chevron was unable to prevail on priority and assigned Wyoming status as the senior party and entered judgment in its favor in the interference. The Federal Circuit affirmed, upholding the Board’s constructions of the limitation “gradually and continuously changing the alkane mobile phase solvent to a final mobile phase solvent.”