By Sara N. Westerberg
JD Candidate, Mitchell Hamline School of Law, 2022. This post is dedicated to all the women who currently serve in the United States Military and all the women who came before them.
Tag: Tort Law
Torts: Sacrificing Individual Recovery for Media Protection–Larson v. Gannett Co., 940 N.W.2d 120 (Minn. 2020)
Imagine a scenario in which a city is in unrest; a man has been killed at the hands of police officers, so protestors have been filling the streets for days, demanding change. In the midst of a protest, a semi-truck enters a closed road and barrels through thousands of protestors. The driver is taken into custody. Law enforcement officers hold an impromptu press conference to inform the city, although the conference is closed to the public because of a global pandemic. In the press conference, the officers state that a man has been taken into custody for swerving into the crowds, and he has ties to a right-wing extremist group; however, the investigation is ongoing. The media promptly reports on these official statements to amplify this relevant government investigation to the public. Once the man is released from custody, he wants to sue the media for defamation—he is not a member of a right-wing extremist group, and the collision was an accident. Should the media be liable for reporting the officials’ defamatory statements, especially those of public concern? Before the Minnesota Supreme Court extended the fair and accurate reporting privilege to cover official news conferences in Larson v. Gannett Co., media organizations could have been liable just for republishing the officers’ defamatory statements.
Continue reading “Torts: Sacrificing Individual Recovery for Media Protection–Larson v. Gannett Co., 940 N.W.2d 120 (Minn. 2020)”Designing Children: Tort Liability for Medical Providers in the Era of CRISPR/CAS-9 Genetic Editing
Once only thought possible in the realm of science fiction, today, scientists are able to edit genes in human embryos using a technique that employs a Clustered, Regularly Interspaced, Short Palindromic Repeat (CRISPR) and a CRISPR associated protein (Cas)—typically Cas-9.1 For ease, this comment will refer to the CRISPR system, inclusive of the Cas protein, as CRISPR/Cas-9.
David Cyranoski, a well-respected Nature editor, remarked that CRISPR/Cas-9 technologies will trigger a “Sputnik 2.0.” Shockingly, China has already used CRISPR/Cas-9 in twin girls to remove part of a gene that is responsible for causing HIV.4 Similarly, CRISPR/Cas-9 has been used on human cancer cells, and it has the potential to be therapeutic for aggressive forms of lung cancer. CRISPR/Cas-9 also enables researchers to produce specific types of tissues by altering genes in pluripotent stem cells. Furthermore, researchers can use CRISPR/Cas-9 to replicate the genetic basis for various human diseases, which will provide unprecedented insight into otherwise enigmatic diseases. Ultimately, at this early stage, the budding uses of CRISPR/Cas-9 extend to sickle cell anemia, cystic fibrosis,
muscular dystrophy, cancer, eye diseases, and HIV.