Beginning in 1981 and continuing into the mid-1990s, The Alledger was the student newspaper of the Boston College Law School. The Alledger published both serious and satirical articles on topics related to student life at the law school. Frequent topics include the arrival and departure of faculty members, profiles of candidates for leadership positions in student government, and previews of lectures given by noteworthy speakers.

The publication consistently poked fun at the law student experience, making professors and classmates alike the targets of good-natured parody. The Alledger featured an annual April Fool’s Day issue which consisted entirely of satirical articles.

The Alledger is a record of the school’s history, offering evidence of an increasingly competitive environment for law schools in the form of extensive coverage of a 1995 dispute related to the U.S. News and World Report law school rankings. The newspaper also recorded changes in the demographics of the student body, as well as frequent discussion of tuition increases and the financial relationship of the law school to the university. Moreover, the humorous and frank tone of The Alledger provides real insight into the lives of law students in the 1980s and 1990s.

The Alledger was digitized from the collection of the Boston College Law School Library. Issues missing from this collection are not owned by the law library; due to frequent inconsistencies in the numbering of issues, the law library is not sure how many issues are missing from this collection.

The Alledger

Boston College Law Review is Boston College Law School's flagship scholarly publication.

The Review, ranked in the top 25 law journals by Washington & Lee, publishes eight issues each year featuring articles and essays by prominent authors addressing legal issues of national interest.

In addition to articles written by outside academics, the Review prints the work of its student staff, many of whom publish notes during their third year. The Review’s second-year staff members also prepare short comments on recent federal circuit court decisions, which may be published in the Review's Electronic Supplement.

Visit the Boston College Law Review website at <a href="http://bclawreview.bc.edu">bclawreview.bc.edu</a>.

Boston College Law Review

Boston College Law Library collects the publications of Law School faculty, and, when possible, makes them available through this collection. Organized by year and tagged with authors and subject areas, this resource reflects the school and the library’s commitment to open access while at the same time serving as a valuable institutional record.

Boston College Law School Faculty Papers

Boston College Law School Lectures and Presentations

Dietary supplement use among Americans has become increasingly prevalent following the COVID-19 pandemic. Manufacturers of dietary supplements depend on patents for success in a competitive market. In order to be patent eligible, supplements cannot be too similar to the natural substances from which they derive. The United States Patent and Trademark Office outlines the markedly different characteristics test, which courts use to determine whether supplements are unique enough to receive patents. Yet the patent cases of two supplements, ChromaDex and Natural Alternatives, reveals significant confusion around the role of dosage and bioavailability of supplements under the markedly different characteristics analysis. This Article examines the markedly different characteristics analysis and evaluates its application to the ChromaDex and Natural Alternatives supplements. This Article ultimately recommends that the USPTO incorporate the ChromaDex and Natural Alternatives rulings into the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure and clarify the existence of a minimum dosage requirement.

Intellectual Property and Technology Forum

A Case for Crying over Spilled Milk: Dosage and Bioavailability in the Patent Subject Matter Eligibility of Dietary Supplements

Working Group III of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law has embarked on a mandate to reform investor-State dispute settlement (ISDS), through identifying a set of concerns that merit multilateral procedural reform. In response, the EU has proposed creating a standing multilateral investment court. Despite the importance of procedural justice theory in domestic legal systems, its value as a resource in international dispute resolution is under-recognized. This article focuses on procedural justice through the literature on the social psychology of justice, as offering an empirically-based theoretical foundation that helps identify key elements and options in designing investment adjudication. Within ISDS reform, the authors focus on necessary innovations in independence and impartiality, transparency, participation, and correction of error, the key pillars of procedural justice research. The EU proposal suggests substituting a more traditional judicial model of dispute resolution for the current and problematic arbitral model, which aligns to a greater degree with the principles of procedural justice.

Designing a Multilateral Investment Court  for Procedural Justice

This is a review of "The Magnetic Pull of American Discovery: Second Thoughts About American Exceptionalism" by Richard Marcus in Proceso Civile e Costituzione (2023).

How Is the Discovery Water Here?

Since Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile barrier in the mid-1950s, the American public has become increasingly obsessed with achieving the impossible. In 2016, the U.S. Patent Office approved Nike’s ground-breaking and controversial patent on its first of many “super shoes,” the Vaporfly, a shoe utilizing a new lightweight foam and carbon fiber plate designed to maximize energy return and enhance running performance. Since then, dozens of other manufacturers have succeeded in developing their own super shoes. Despite this progress, however, critics contend that the approval of Nike’s Vaporfly patent not only threatens the integrity of running as a sport but also stifles innovation amongst industry players. In contrast, this Article argues that the Vaporfly’s patent approval and subsequent patent regulation has actually stimulated competition among companies and led to significant economic payoffs for Nike and its competition.

How Existing Patent Regulations Encourage Competition in the "Super Shoe" Race



How the law contributes to economic inequality is the subject of renewed attention, but the legal dimensions of geographic inequality have received much less scrutiny. At its core, geographic inequality is a function of how the national income gets spatially divided between capital and labor. While labor’s share of national income has generally declined, workers in rural and distressed communities have suffered most at the expense of capital. Recent empirical research on rural and distressed labor markets reveals an important structural cause: disproportionately high levels of employer market power with weak, if any, countervailing worker power to check it. While federal labor market regulation was intended to prevent this outcome nationally, it has failed these workers and the communities they support, contributing to and reinforcing geographic inequality. The failure of our legal infrastructure erodes economic self-determination in a place-based manner. But it also generates place-specific and place-salient resentment, perceptions of democratic disempowerment, and significant political polarization between spaces of wealth generation and wealth extraction.

This Article is the first comprehensive effort to tackle the legal sources of geographic labor market inequality. It documents the convergence of unique labor market failures in rural and distressed labor markets and identifies how federal labor market regulation has contributed to and exacerbated those failures to employers’ benefit and at workers’ expense. Specifically, it describes how rural and distressed labor markets have unusually high levels of labor market concentration, market thinness, and natural monopsony, worsening market frictions that exist in thicker, more competitive urban labor markets. Neither federal employment policy nor labor, employment, and antitrust rules have recognized these geographically-specific realities. Instead, while appearing to operate in a place-neutral manner, the legal infrastructure they jointly create carves out and deregulates the types of labor markets, categories of workers, and employer conduct that are most prevalent in rural and distressed environments. They are thus ill-adapted to remedy market failures unique to rural and distressed spaces to ensure workers’ access to livable wages and countervailing leverage against employers. The Article reconceptualizes labor market regulation through a place-based lens, adapting and tailoring existing regulatory tools and proposing broader, more interventionist efforts to restructure and regulate the employment bargain outside of thick urban markets. It draws from historical examples of workforce investment and successful economic governance in markets facing similar characteristics to propose solutions that can revive rural and distressed communities by increasing worker power and generating diversified and high-quality job growth.

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The Alledger

Boston College Law Review

Boston College Law School Faculty Papers

Boston College Law School Lectures and Presentations

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A Case for Crying over Spilled Milk: Dosage and Bioavailability in the Patent Subject Matter Eligibility of Dietary Supplements

Designing a Multilateral Investment Court for Procedural Justice

How Is the Discovery Water Here?

How Existing Patent Regulations Encourage Competition in the "Super Shoe" Race

The Law of Geographic Labor Market Inequality

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Welcome to LIRA@BC Law!

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Recent Additions

The Alledger