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On May 19, 2023, in Clark v. A&L Homecare and Training Center, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit held that plaintiffs seeking to add other employees to Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) suits must demonstrate a “strong likelihood” that such employees are “similarly situated” before district courts facilitate notice informing them of their right to opt in. In articulating this new standard, the Sixth Circuit declined to adopt the lenient approach endorsed by a majority of courts or the strict approach endorsed by the Fifth Circuit, opting instead to land somewhere in between. This Comment argues that the Sixth Circuit erred by improperly analogizing distinct mechanisms of law at the expense of the FLSA’s purpose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Manufactured finality is an umbrella term for the various ways that federal litigants try to create a final, appealable decision. And it has an uncertain future after the Supreme Court's decision in Microsoft Corp. 73 . Baker. Yet existing studies of manufactured finality have failed to appredate its nuances. Several different varieties of manufactured finality exist. Each applies in different contexts, implicates different interests, and has different prospects for future use after Microsoft. In this Article, I comprehensively detail the variables that go into manufactured finality, create a typology of the various forms of manufactured finality that appear in the courts of appeals, and address Microsoft's impact on each of those forms. In the course of doing so, I raise two larger issues. The first concerns how we define finality. The predominant conception of finality looks to the substance of a district court's decision, asking if that court has actually disposed of all claims in an action. The law of appellate jurisdiction might be improved by shifting the focus to asking simply whether the district court has finished with an action. The second issue concerns the role that litigants play in determining when they can appeal. As things stand, courts have essentially complete control over those matters. Experience with manufactured finality suggests that litigants should have some say in identifying proper opportunities for interlocutory appeals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Chinese courts issued a spate of anti-suit injunctions ("ASIs") in licensing disputes between holders of standard-essential patents ("SEPs") and implementers, there have been growing concerns about the weaponization of ASIs in the global SEP licensing battles on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory ("FRAND") terms. This Essay will discuss how the aggressive use of ASIs by Chinese courts, along with their assertion of jurisdiction to set global licensing rates at abnormally low levels, contributes to this concern. It is not helpful, however, to cast the ASIs in purely geopolitical terms. More than anything else, ASIs are being used to gain an advantage in licensing negotiations, and they may perversely play a positive role in facilitating the settlement of FRAND disputes. Instead of trying to curb the use of ASIs per se, more attention needs to be paid to solving the forum shopping problem in global FRAND litigation that leads to the issuance of ASIs in the first place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]