MJLST is a Cutting-Edge Multidisciplinary Journal

The Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology is a cutting-edge multidisciplinary journal focusing on law, health, the sciences, and bioethics. The journal is edited by faculty and students with a Faculty Editorial Advisory Board drawn from across the University of Minnesota. MJLST tackles issues in intellectual property, technology policy and innovation, bioethics, and law and science, while maintaining a rigorous grounding in law, values, and policy. Formerly the Minnesota Intellectual Property Review, the journal is overseen and managed by the University's Consortium on Law and Values in Health, Environment & the Life Sciences.

MJLST is Real Time: Visit the LawSci Blog & Twitter Feed

Interested in breaking news, events, and commentary at the intersection of law, science and technology? Visit the new Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology LawSci Blog and the MJLST Twitter Feed.

If you're a journal, Consortium, or Joint Degree Program alum and want to keep in touch, contact us to join our rapidly growing MJLST Alumni LinkedIn Group.

MJLST Offers Advance Online Publication

The Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology offers authors the opportunity to publish articles online in advance of appearing in MJLST's print publication. This helps assure that time-sensitive articles can be disseminated while they are most relevant.

_{April 25, 2013}

Student Notes Selected for Issue 15.1

Congratulations to the student authors who will be published in Issue 15.1 of the Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology. These notes represent a cross-section of the cutting-edge interdisciplinary work we strive to publish in each issue of MJLST.

_{March 1, 2013}

New Law Journal Rankings: MJLST Moves Up

Each year Washington & Lee University Law School releases rankings of law journals. The rankings are roughly based on the number of times the journal is cited in the prior eight years. Once again, MJLST is ranked in the top ten nationally and continues to improve - moving up in 2 out of 4 categories. Here's the results in each category we are ranked in:

^{February 27, 2013}

Editors Selected for Volume 15

The Editor in Chief and Executive Editor for next year's 15th volume of MJLST were recently selected. Please join us in congratulating them!

Caroline Marsili, Editor-in-Chief , Graduated cum laude from Carleton College with a BA in biology and anticipates earning her JD from the U of M in 2014. She is currently pursuing a concentration in Intellectual Property and Technology Law.

Brandon Palmen, Executive Editor, Graduated from Harvard University with an A.B. in economics and an A.L.M. in information technology. He is currently a J.D./M.B.A dual degree student at the University of Minnesota. Before beginning law school, Brandon was a software engineer at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, helping to incubate the StopBadware initiative before and during its launch as an independent non-profit organization.

^{February 13, 2013}

Issue 14.1 Now Available Online (with an Online Enhancement)

The full print formatted edition of MJLST Issue 14.1 (Winter 2013) is now available online.

In keeping with our ongoing effort to increase the accessibility of our articles and provide the best services for our authors, we've made a small but important change to how those articles are stored and retrieved online. All articles in this issue (which can be accessed at the "Current Issue" link to the left) are now archived in the University of Minnesota's Digital Conservancy. Placing them in this public repository provides a number of benefits to readers and authors including that each article now has a permanent URL. The article URL will never change and the article will always be retrievable at that location. In addition, each article is indexed with hand-selected keywords and a full abstract, which will make the articles easier for readers to find and will improve indexing of the articles on search engines.

Authors citing to the online source of MJLST articles should use the article's MJLST URL and can be confident that the article will always be retrievable at that location, whether that be a year from now or twenty years from now. In the coming months all prior volumes of MJLST will be moved to the Conservancy.

 ^{January 31, 2013}

Consortium on Law & Values Deinard Lecture: "Slouching Toward Health Care Reform"

George Washington University's Sara Rosenbaum, JD, spoke on "Slouching Toward Health Care Reform: The Future of the Affordable Care Act" for this year's Deinard Memorial Lecture on Law & Medicine. Considered one of the nation's 500 most influential health policy makers, Prof. Rosenbaum addressed the challenges ahead for the ACA. Prof. Lynn Blewett from the School of Public Health delivered the commentary. A paper from Professor Rosenbaum's lecture is scheduled to appear in an upcoming issue of MJLST.

    Listen to Prof. Rosenbaum on Minnesota Public Radio's "The Daily Circuit" show.
  Watch a video of the Lecture
 

^{November 16, 2012}

Consortium on Law & Values, on MPR's "The Daily Circuit"

Laurence Steinberg, visiting speaker for the Lecture Series on law, Health & the Life Sciences, and Susan Wolf, Consortium Founding Chair, recently appeared on Minnesota Public Radio's The Daily Circuit radio program.

Professor Steinberg talked with Kerri Miller about adolescent brain development, and juvenile offenders.  MJLST will be publishing an article by Professor Steinberg in issue 14.2 this spring. Video of his recent lecture "Should the Science of Adolescent Brain Development Inform Legal Policy" presented at the University of Minnesota is available here.

Professor Wolf discussed physician assisted suicide, the problems raised by underground assisted-suicide organizations such as the Final Exit Network, and the importance of pain relief, palliative care, and other supportive end-of-life options.

^{October 15, 2012}

Hari Osofsky Named Interim Director of Consortium on Law and Values & Joint Degree Program

Associate Professor Hari M. Osofsky has agreed to serve as interim director of the Consortium on Law and Values in Health, Environment and the Life Sciences and the Joint Degree Program in Law, Health and the Life Sciences.

Since joining the Law School faculty in 2010, Professor Osofsky has served as the Consortium’s Associate Director of Law, Geography and Environment. She also has affiliate appointments in Geography and Conservation Biology, and serves as a Fellow in the Institute on the Environment.

As interim director, Professor Osofsky succeeds Professor Susan Wolf, who is on sabbatical this year after serving for 12 years as the Consortium’s Founding Chair and Director of the Joint Degree Program. Please join us in thanking Susan Wolf for her exceptional work over the past 12 years, and in welcoming Hari Osofsky to her new role.

 

^{August 8, 2012}

Rolling on the River: Metagenomics in the Mississippi

UMN Professor and MJLST Faculty Editorial Advisory Board Member Michael Sadowsky, PhD, is on a mission to get the genetic fingerprint of all the bacteria in the Mississippi River, from Lake Itasca to where the river leaves the state at La Crescent.

Working in the emerging discipline of metagenomics, which involves studying the combined genetic material of microorganisms harvested from a natural setting rather than examining single species of organisms grown in the lab, Sadowsky is leading the Minnesota Mississippi Metagenome Project (M3P). By collecting genetic samples from the river, mapping where and when each bacterium is collected, and then sequencing its DNA, Sadowsky and his team are learning how the river's composition changes as it moves south and about the impact of land use on the water. Read more about M3P and watch a video of Sadowsky explaining the project.
 

^{August 3, 2012}

Who should tell; who should know? MJLST Symposium addresses debate over return of incidental research findings. Now available online

If researchers using genetic material from human tissue repositories called biobanks find important health information about a donor, what are their obligations? To date, there are no standard protocols in place for such a situation and debate continues over the responsibilities around return of results in the complex world of large-scale genomic and genetic research.

NIH-funded Consortium research on this increasingly critical topic resulted in two symposia. One included a consensus article proposing the first guidelines for the return of incidental findings. The other, in the current issue of the Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology (MJLST), focuses on law, ethics, and oversight concerns. Read the issue online.

 ^{July 21, 2012}

Consortium Event: Dr.Jørgen Schlundt, Global Food Safety Regulatory and Policy Challenges Video Now Online

MJLST is managed by the University's Consortium on Law and Values in Health, Environment & the Life Sciences, which hosts numerous events throughout the year.

In this lecture held on April 25, 2012, Dr.Jørgen Schlundt, Deputy Director of the National Food Institute at the Technical University of Denmark, discussed global food safety regulatory and policy challenges, including the need for international policy alignment. Watch the Video

^{June 18, 2012}

MJLST Faculty Editor-in-Chief Co-Authors Wall Street Journal Op Ed: FDA Approvals a Mattter of Life and Death

MJLST faculty editor-in-chief Ralph Hall and Andrew Von Eschenbach, former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (2005-2009), wrote an opinion piece in the June 17 Wall Street Journal on ways to move medical devices more quickly into the hands of health care practitioners. They cite the example of the American-made SAPIEN Transcatheter Heart Valve (pictured right)  that was available to patients in Europe four years before those in the United States. Read "FDA Approvals Are a Matter of Life and Death" (WSJ)

 

 ^{March 29, 2012}

A Subscription to MJLST Maximizes the Impact of your Library Dollars

According to Washington & Lee University Law School's law journal rankings, MJLST is the top subscription value among journals in the following topical areas: Health, Medicine, Psychology, and Psychiatry; Science, Technology & Computing; Environment, Natural Resources, and Land Use; and Intellectual Property - when measured by the number of times the journal is cited annually compared to the cost of a subscription.
Information on subscribing to MJLST is available here.