Future research directions at camp

A huge part of this area of the topic is patents good/bad, and I feel like I only scratched the surface of the literature. The same is true for prizes and R&D.

There is a possible international law advantage – the Rader evidence in the 1ac makes a broader claim about international law in that article, and there are many articles that talk about patent eligibility in the context of US international IP leadership.

The greatest liability of the affirmative is PICs. If the affirmative overturns 4 Court decisions, it should at least have a defense of why overturning each is important, and add-on advantages related to each one. There’s a start to that in this file for the Myriad and Alice decisions, but more work needs to be done.

Narrowing the scope of the affirmative is another option. There is a large body of evidence advocating to only overturn Myriad, or even just part of Myriad. The issue with those affirmatives is that advantage ground is far more limited, and it’s much more difficult to access the uncertainty claims, so it will take a lot of work to create credible advantages. But in many ways, it’s a stronger version of the affirmative because you won’t be responsible for defending so much.

A very good article to start this work is:

Josh Saul, 2024 - J.D. Candidate, 2025, Fordham University School of Law; Ph.D., 2021, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; B.A., 2014, University of California, Berkeley. “GENE PATENTS: STRIKING THE RIGHT BALANCE BETWEEN INCENTIVE AND INNOVATION” FORDHAM LAW REVIEW, Vol. 92: 2765, May,

Saul advocates human gene patenting, so there are two great cards in the article for why his proposal doesn’t link to the pathogen patents DA. There are a few more law reviews that support this approach, and you can find them in the footnotes that Saul lists.