A Welcome Conversation: Toward a New Historiography of Intellectual Property

This essay considers what tools should be used to study the legal history of intellectual property. I identify three historiographical strategies: narration, contest, and formation. Narration identifies the diverse “narrative structures” that shape the field of intellectual property history. Contest highlights how the inherent instability of intellectual property as a legal concept prompts recurrent debates over its meaning. Formation recognizes how intellectual property historians can offer insight into broader legal history debates over how to consider the relationship between informal social practices and formalized legal mechanisms. I consider Kara W. Swanson's Banking on the Body: The Market in Blood, Milk and Sperm in Modern America (2014) in light of these historiographical strategies and conclude that Swanson's book guides us to a new conversation in the legal history of intellectual property law.     

Identification and isolation of male cells using fluorescence in situ hybridisation and laser microdissection, for use in the investigation of sexual assault

In cases of sexual assault involving an azoospermic assailant, vaginal swabs taken from the victim may fail to provide an autosomal DNA profile with which to search a suspect database, as the signal from any male cells present would be masked by that from the overwhelming number of female cells collected on the swab. Here, we describe a method of visually identifying diploid male cells in such samples using fluorescence in situ hybridisation, and selectively harvesting them by means of laser microdissection. This combination of techniques was tested on 26 post-coital vaginal swabs taken at a range of times after intercourse; the collected cells were then subjected to a simple lysis procedure and DNA was amplified using the AmpFlSTR^® SGMPlus^® multiplex under low copy number conditions. Useful DNA profiles were generated from samples taken up to 24 h after intercourse.     

The Two Halves of Sports-Diplomacy

ABSTRACT

What strategies does the United States pursue when it no longer perceives overt military intervention as politically viable or desirable but the problems or issues for which it was formerly undertaken remain? This analysis identifies three such periods in American foreign policy since the United States became a World Power and draws from the work of Peter Hall to develop a typology of strategies according to the magnitude of policy change. These range from adjustment in the settings of interventionism – persistence; the substitution of alternative instruments of foreign policy – ameliorism; and the principled rejection of interventionism in conjunction with a more systematic critique of prevailing foreign policy assumptions – transformationalism. Yet each approach is beset by certain structural limits and contradictions arising from the domestic politics and constitutional-institutional system of the United States that are important in understandiing and appreciating more fully the challenges – and opportunities – of the period ‘after interventionism’.