St. John's University Law Faculty Blog

Professor Jeremy Sheff’s manuscript, The Canada Trademarks Dataset, has been accepted for publication by the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (JELS), a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal. The manuscript accompanies the release of an original research dataset compiled by Professor Sheff from Canadian government records and published on open-access terms. An abstract the article follows:

This article discloses and describes a new research dataset representing the Canadian Intellectual Property Office’s historical archive of trademark applications. This individual-application-level dataset includes all applications since approximately 1980, and many preserved applications and registrations dating back to the beginning of Canada’s trademark registry in 1865, totaling over 1.6 million applications. It includes comprehensive bibliographic and lifecycle data; trademark characteristics; goods and services claims; identification of applicants, attorneys, and other interested parties (including address data); detailed prosecution history event data; and links to application, registration, and use claims in countries other than Canada. Both the dataset and the code used to build and analyze it are presented for public use on open-access terms. This article uses the dataset to generate novel descriptive analyses of the performance of Canada’s trademark registration system and the behavior of applicants for registration, both independently and in comparison to the United States and Australia. These analyses suggest that Canada’s trademark registration system is substantially underperforming other nations with respect to efficiency of examination, and that recent statutory and regulatory changes in Canadian trademark law may have the effect of masking or even exacerbating this underperformance while decreasing the reliability of the Canadian trademark registry as an authoritative guide to trademarks used in Canadian commerce.

A pre-publication draft of The Canada Trademarks Dataset is available here. 

Professor Cheryl L. Wade will comment on the role of corporations in social movements today at 1:45pm EDT. The lecture is sponsored by The Journal of Corporation Law and the University of Iowa Black Law Students Association.

Please join us using this Zoom link.

In February, March, and April of this year, Professor Kate Klonick gave a number of lectures and panel presentations on her research on the Facebook Oversight Board, the growth of private governance structures, and the suspension of Donald Trump from the two biggest speech platforms in the world. These include but are not limited to:

• Lex Informatica Symposium, Berkeley Law, Apr. 2021, Moderator
• Regulating Social Media — How? When? Who Will Write the Rules?, Georgetown Law, Apr. 2021, Panelist
• Frenemies of the Press, Yale Abrams Institute for Free Expression, Mar. 2021, Moderator
• Social Media Governance & Content Moderation, Cardozo Law, Mar. 2021, Panelist
• Antitrust Panel: Trump v. Twitter, NYU Law School, Mar. 2021, Panelist
• Tech, Media and Democracy, Cornell Law and Cornell Tech, Mar. 1, Panelist
• TechLaw: Hindsight is 2020, Arizona Law, Feb. 2021, Panelist
• The Fate of Donald Trump on Facebook, R Street, Feb. 2021, Panelist

Professor Klonick was also a guest lecturer for classes at Yale Law School, Columbia Journalism School, and Northwestern University Law School. Additionally, she was a visiting professor for the semester at Cornell Tech, teaching Professor James Grimmelmann’s Internet Law Class to a joint group of students from Cornell Law School and Cornell Tech’s LLM program.

In February she published an article in the New Yorker on her observation of the Oversight Board formation. This article was the focus of a New Yorker Radio Hour with David Remnick, a Radiolab podcast, and The Weeds Podcast with Matt Yglesias. She also appeared on CBS Saturday Morning and in a CNN/Vox documentary on social media’s rise.

In March, she, along with former Editor-in-Chief of the Guardian Alan Rusbridger gave official witness testimony to the UK’s House of Lords.

In April, she was named a non-resident Fellow at the Brookings Institute.

Since the start of the pandemic, she has co-hosted a daily hour-long live video show with Ben Wittes, Editor in Chief of Lawfare. Guests have included Jim Comey, Chuck Rosenberg, John McWhorter, Kara Swisher, Dahlia Lithwick, Whit Stillman, Rep. Tom Malinowski, Preet Bharara, and SJU Law’s own John Barrett and Jeremy Sheff. The show will soon mark its 400th episode. 

Professor Anna Roberts has devised and will co-organize a panel scheduled for the 2022 AALS Annual Meeting. The topic is “Rethinking Criminal Law Language,’ and co-panelists are Lauryn Gouldin, Guy Hamilton-Smith, Janet Moore, Michael Pinard, Alice Ristroph, Maybell Romero, and India Thusi.

Professor Roberts’s scholarship on jury exclusion on the basis of criminal convictions was highlighted in a recent Prison Policy Initiative report on the same topic. Finally, she presented on conviction-based impeachment and jury exclusion for an event on “Addressing the Perpetual Punishment of Criminal Records,” hosted by the FedCap Group (see photo).