Susan Rickman

"Test case litigation" defines judicial cases purposely brought before a court with the hopes of penetrating common law (laws established by legal precedent rather than legislative statute). Heavily based on strategy, test cases involve lawyers with a distinctly political agenda: activist lawyers deliberately manufacture controversy to bring cases before courts that would otherwise lack a justiciable dispute. Their goal is to secure a ruling on a specific issue, requiring careful selection of...

In January of 2025, the 10-year old Meta v Federal Trade Commission ruling was finally delivered in favor of Meta Inc. The U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia found that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) had failed to prove that Meta illegally maintained a monopoly in “personal social networking.” The lawsuit was brought on by the FTC in December 2020, alleging that Meta (then Facebook) violated the Federal Trade Commission Act (FTC Act) through prolonged anticompetitive...

The evolutions and stark increases in artificial intelligence over the past couple of decades arguably represent the largest confrontation humanity has faced in such a short span of time. Seeping into every sector, discipline, and structure, the rise of AI and its subsequent impacts on innovation has been accompanied by widespread doubt over the threats it poses to human creativity. One large manifestation of such fears is the new role AI plays in intellectual property (IP) and trademark...