The Rutgers Law Record

More than 57,000 unaccompanied minors have crossed the United States border since January 2014. At risk youth flee gang violence in their home country. They come to the United States hoping that the government will consider resistance to joining gangs as grounds for asylum, and allow them to stay. For example, seventeen-year-old Ken is an undocumented immigrant from Honduras who has lived in the United States for two years but has recently been issued an order of deportation.

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After World War II, many European countries have tried to put into effect their own constitutions and as a result, their own welfare states. They invested and spent a significant amount of their national economic resources to guarantee social rights to all citizens, health care, retirement plans, and education. In order to guarantee the aforementioned rights, politicians decided to take on a huge amount of debt, regardless of the fact that sooner or later it would be difficult to control. On the other side of the world, the U.S. fears socialist programs. However, this did not exempt the U.S. from having one of the largest public debts in the world.
This article not only tries to explore the Italian welfare state by focusing attention on the Italian health care system, but also proposes interesting discussion points from a comparative perspective. On one side, Italy represents a classic socialist country. On the other, the U.S. is very capitalistic. The 2008 economic crisis imposed the need to reflect on the sustainability of the welfare state and its future development.

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Debt is an American epidemic. The total sum of consumer debt in the United States (U.S.) is approximately $11.4 trillion dollars. From 1985 to 2007, an average households’ debt increased from roughly 60% of post-tax annual income to more than 125%. During that same period, debt-to-income ratios nearly doubled. Furthermore, roughly 35% of all adults, more than 77 million Americans, hold debt that is delinquent and in collection. As a result, debt collection companies have found a viable and rapidly expanding market in debt collection. Currently, the debt-collecting industry employs nearly 500,000 people (debt purchasers) in the U.S. alone. In a study conducted by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) between 2009 and 2012, nine of the largest buyers of defaulted debt on the secondary market acquired $143 billion in defaulted loans but paid only $6.5 billion for defaulted loan’s acquisition. This acquisition cost is equal to only four cents per dollar of defaulted debt. It is debt purchaser’s goal to collect as much of the remaining debt value as possible.

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When terrorists struck the United States on September 11, 2011, no one thought that intellectual property (IP) piracy funded the attack. Even with the 2014 Sony hack by North Korea, many people thought intellectual property (IP) piracy at that level was not possible. On the surface, intellectual property (IP) piracy and terrorism appear to be two distant topics. However, these topics are closely connected, as terrorist groups, especially those in developing nations, thrive on IP piracy allowing for the successful funding of terrorist opportunities. Terrorist groups gravitate towards IP piracy for funding because detection of IP piracy is easily evaded and developing nations do not thoroughly understand it. As a result, IP piracy presents a distinct global dilemma.

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While patentees have “the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling [their] invention[s],” there is no obligation to manufacture or commercialize it. One of the most famous patents for a bacterium that was capable of breaking down crude oil in order to treat oil spills was never produced, despite its immense potential usefulness and an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court to get the patent approved. There are a number of reasons why a patentee may never end up commercializing his or her invention. For instance, “a nonmanufacturing patentee may lack the expertise or resources to produce a patented product, prefer to commit itself to further innovation, or otherwise have legitimate reasons for its behavior.” Chakrabarty, the inventor of the renowned oil-eating bacterium, likely never put his famous invention to public use because of the unknown environmental consequences of dumping the bacteria into water supplies. However, a patentee may not commercialize his product for nefarious reasons, such as using patents “as a bargaining tool to charge exorbitant fees to companies that seek to buy licenses to practice the patent.”

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