New York Law School

ABSTRACT Legal scholars and courts have long viewed disclaimers of affiliation as an ineffective tool for dispelling trademark confusion. We revisit this debate with new evidence from two randomized experiments. Consistent with earlier research, we find that disclaimers alone do not dispel consumer confusion. Our experiments show, however, that simply requiring consumers to register their recognition of a disclaimer can reduce confusion to levels that most courts would consider negligible. We tested two disclaimer acknowledgment tasks in an online shopping context: a burdensome task in which participants were required to retype the text of the disclaimer before they could continue with the study and a much simpler task in which participants were required to click a box affirming that they read and understood the disclaimer in order to continue. The tasks were similarly effective in lowering the probability of confusion to levels below the threshold that would typically trigger a finding of likelihood of confusion.

Abstract Research Summary Alternatives to police response to 911 calls have emerged as a leading public safety reform strategy. A key policy implementation challenge lies in determining whether alternative responders, police, or both are most appropriate for a given situation—a decision that largely falls to 911 call takers and dispatchers. This article examines how dispatch organizations have tried to structure these decisions through protocols and decision trees. Drawing on 39 interviews and 20 h of observations with 911 workers in San Francisco and Denver, we argue that these tools, as currently structured, are poorly suited to handle the uncertainty, subjectivity, and ambiguity that characterize many street crisis calls. In the absence of more thoughtfully designed guidance from leadership, we find that dispatch staff routinely work around the rules to attain the response they believe is most appropriate. Policy Implications Addressing the dispatch protocol issue is critical for the success of the alternative response movement. Absent workable protocols, dispatchers sometimes default to sending the police, undermining the progress alternative response promises. Applying our learnings from Denver and San Francisco, this study points to a two‐pronged approach that dispatch agencies can use to improve call diversion guidance. First, they can refine existing protocols and decision trees by grounding them in the experiential knowledge of frontline staff. Second, they can supplement these tools with more flexible forms of guidance—such as organizational value statements or collaborative decision‐making frameworks—to aid decision making when protocols reach their limits. Together, these changes can produce guidance that is more responsive to the realities of dispatch work and better aligned with the goals of alternative response.

Background: Benzodiazepine withdrawal is highly heterogeneous, ranging from mild, transient symptoms to a severe, protracted syndrome. Existing descriptive approaches catalog symptoms without explaining the underlying biology, which often makes the tapering schedule the sole focus of management-an approach that provides only partial relief. Methods: Baseline data from 39 patients in a specialty taper program were analyzed. To assign phenotypes, symptoms reported in a comprehensive 233-item questionnaire were mapped onto five pre-specified mechanistic axes reflecting neurobiological and immune pathways. Results: Most patients (79.5%) clustered into one of three phenotypes: corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH)-heavy (35.9%), excitatory-neuroinflammatory (ENI) (33.3%), or Autonomic (10.3%). The remaining patients were classified as Low-symptom (17.9%) or Mixed (2.6%); no patients were classified as Basal Ganglia-Cerebellar (BG/Cer). Features consistent with mast cell activation (MCAS-overlap) were observed in just over half of the cohort (53.8%). PROMIS-29 scores demonstrated severe, multi-domain functional impairment, with notably elevated T-scores in Anxiety and Fatigue. Conclusion: Benzodiazepine withdrawal is not a unitary syndrome but clusters into reproducible, biologically grounded phenotypes. Notably, nearly 80% of patients in this cohort fell into just three of these phenotypes, suggesting that withdrawal, though heterogeneous, may follow structured and predictable patterns. Recognizing these patterns enables clinicians to anticipate vulnerabilities and personalize management, shifting the therapeutic goal from merely executing a taper to stabilizing the underlying neurobiology.

<p dir="ltr">The highly anticipated decision of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Caster Semenya v International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) has quickly become its most (in)famous. Whatever one might think of the regulations at issue in this case — by which the IAAF excludes certain female athletes with “differences of sexual development” from the female category of competition — the Panel's decision is an instructive example of the limits of the CAS when it comes to the adjudication of human rights claims. This article argues that the CAS stamp of approval is no guarantee of human rights compliance and therefore the IAAF cannot rely on the decision to credibly claim its female eligibility regulations respect, let alone promote, human rights. This conclusion is reached through the identification of multiple shortcomings in the CAS Panel's analysis of the necessity, reasonableness and proportionality of the IAAF's discriminatory regulations. It demonstrates that such analysis effectively placed the burdens of 'gender equality' — in particular, the burden of the IAAF’s history of gender discrimination, the burden of uncertainty in the IAAF’s evidence, and the burden of ongoing risk of harm arising from the IAAF’s regulations — on Semenya and other targeted female athletes. Some concluding remarks are then offered on the implications of the decision for the protection and promotion of human rights in sport.</p>

267 The key policy objective of the post-financial crisis is to ban bailouts, especially for solvent banks. Precautionary recapitalization is an instrument of flexibility in the post-financial crisis regulatory framework that allows solvent but undercapitalized banks to receive capital aids under strict conditions, including the temporary nature of the aid. However, this instrument confronts a credibility issue as the public ownership of financial institutions persists several years after the use of precautionary recapitalizations.We analyze the legal and economic reasons that make the temporary nature of precautionary recapitalizations de facto unenforceable, proposing an analytical framework to approach the matter. In so doing, we challenge the consensus approach to the design of public interventions in banking, which focuses on the trade-offs between minimizing ex-ante moral hazard of bankers, preserving financial stability, and protecting taxpayers. We show that this approach is incomplete as it overlooks the ex-post effects of the intervention, jeopardizing its ex-ante credibility as well. Against this backdrop, we examine the implementation of precautionary recapitalization in the cases of National Bank of Greece, Piraeus Bank, and Monte dei Paschi di Siena. The analysis identifies the key factors undermining the temporary nature of the recapitalizations; specifically, the assessment of the bank’s solvency, the timing of recapitalization, the type of instruments employed, and the political economy of the recapitalization process. Finally, we briefly confront our findings with the Commission’s Crisis Management and Deposit Insurance (CMDI) proposal. We show that the CMDI wants to address the symptoms rather than the causes when reforming precautionary recapitalization, proposing an overly rigid system that is prone to abuses and political distortions.