“Artists and creators who are interested in using AI generators will potentially use them but not register their works, waiting, hopefully, for a change in the legal position,” said Edward Lee, an intellectual property law professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law. “But some might shy away from even using AI at all.”
Noah Smith-Drelich, a professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law at Illinois Institute of Technology, said the right to travel is “well-established” in the law and a fundamental right protected under different parts of the U.S. Constitution. But amid a patchwork of contradictory laws and widespread uncertainty about enforcement policies, “I think it’ll be one of the major issues” in the post-Dobbs landscape, Smith-Drelich said.
Should Democratic primary victor Eileen O’Neill Burke ultimately win the state's attorney's office, she would quickly face formulating her own reform agenda, making cases to tamp down Chicago’s persistent gun violence, and running an office struggling with morale issues. “As much as numbers have gone down, the amount of street crime is extraordinarily high and has a tremendous impact on the community,” said Richard Kling, a clinical professor of law at Chicago-Kent College of Law.
There are two paths by which prosecution and defense may seek to remove or strike prospective jurors. The first is “for cause,” which means for a stated and qualified reason such as bias. The second is "peremptory," which means the prosecution or defense doesn’t need to give a reason, said Nancy S. Marder, a jury scholar and professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law. The cause strikes are unlimited, but the peremptory strikes for each side are capped based on the level of felony charges in this case. In Trump’s trial, they’re set at 10 for each side of the regular jurors.
“That kind of correlation, where you can say, ‘This chemical or this product caused this specific illness for this person,’ is just not something that science is going to be able to produce,” said Noah Smith-Drelich, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law who has studied mass torts like the relaxer case. “What science does better is probabilistic (to) say more broadly that this group of people have this level of exposure and have this increase in developing this injury.”
Illinois Institute of Technology Engineering Professor Gongkang Fu questioned whether it would be feasible to design a bridge to withstand the type of allision, a moving object striking a stationary object, that occurred between the Dali and the Key Bridge, given how costly such fortification would likely be. “That doesn’t mean that we shy away from our responsibilities as bridge engineers,” Fu said. “We can improve, but I don’t think it’s going to be feasible to prevent that kind of thing from happening.”
Illinois Institute of Technology engineering professor Gongkang Fu said the first step to rebuilding will be to assess the foundational pieces of the bridge underwater. “The pieces we don't see ... are more expensive than the pieces we see, normally,” Fu said.
Chicago Public Schools juniors and seniors could trim two years off the time it takes to earn a college degree in a new dual-enrollment program with City Colleges of Chicago and Illinois Institute of Technology. The Runway 606 program, starting this fall, will allow any CPS student with a 2.5 GPA to apply for dual enrollment with City Colleges of Chicago and a pathway to earn a technology-based degree at Illinois Institute of Technology.
“Technology is infused in every part of our society,” Illinois Tech President Raj Echambadi said. “So if a student or a learner is not equipped with technology, then obviously the society, the community, the city, the state and the nation suffers. This is a very small step for us, but hopefully, it will be a giant leap for Chicago.”
“What’s occurring is a form of information warfare, controlling information that gets in and out,” said Maurice Dawson, assistant professor of cybersecurity at Illinois Tech. “As we ban this app in this country, realize that in China all Western apps are banned, so there’s no Facebook, Instagram, none of that stuff. That’s something many Americans don’t realize.”
