Digital Commons Network^™

The Role Of Vaccination Decision Making In Coparenting In The Post Covid-19 World, Alexandria Kozak

GGU Law Review Blog

The practice of coparenting has long been fraught with difficulties and disagreements. The Covid-19 pandemic has compounded these difficulties. With the increased politization that surrounded the pandemic, vaccination became a particularly polarizing issue. So, what is a parent to do if they wish to vaccinate their child, but their coparent will not agree? This issue has found its way to many courts in the last few years.

Worker Participation In A Time Of Covid: A Case Study Of Occupational Health And Safety Regulation In Ontario, Alan Hall, Eric Tucker

Articles & Book Chapters

This study examines worker voice in the development and implementation of safety plans or protocols for covid-19 prevention among hospital workers, long-term care workers, and education workers in the Canadian province of Ontario. Although Ontario occupational health and safety law and official public health policy appear to recognize the need for active consultation with workers and labour unions, there were limited – and in some cases no – efforts by employers to meaningfully involve workers, worker representatives (reps), or union officials in assessing covid-19 risks and planning protection and prevention measures. The political and legal efforts of workers and unions …

Of Landlords And Tenants: Property In The Midst Of A Pandemic, Seng Wei, Edward Ti

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Described as the crisis of our generation, the coronavirus pandemic has had a profound effect on consumption behaviour, in turn devastating businesses globally. Marking a departure from the sanctity of contract and causing perceived incursions to accrued legal rights, the Coronavirus Act 2020 and related legislation provide business tenancies protection, among others, against forfeiture for non-payment of rent. While this regulation of commercial tenancies appears to be justified on the basis of pragmatic utility, I suggest that Honoré’s incident of ownership prohibiting harmful use also allows for these emergency laws to be vindicated from a property perspective. This provides an …

Inaction As A State Response To The Coronavirus Outbreak: Unconstitutionality By Omission, Antonios Kouroutakis

Seattle University Law Review SUpra

The World Health Organization on March 11 declared the novel coronavirus outbreak a pandemic. While the pandemic was spreading across the globe, governments were under pressure to respond. Still, some countries during the first wave of the pandemic, in their first reaction, did not put in place any emergency regulations. Such reaction, which was a policy option, was an intended omission as lawmakers and policy makers decided not to take action and such emergency omission was a novelty and a paradox in emergency situations. Moreover, I argue that during emergencies governments have a distinct duty to act, and I offer …

The Public/Private Distinction In Public Health: The Case Of Covid-19, Aziza Ahmed, Jason Jackson

Faculty Scholarship

In this Essay, we argue that the paradigm of the public/private distinction is implicitly operating as a primary frame in the public health response to the pandemic. The public/private distinction is particularly evident in the guidance around masking and other risk-mitigation policies and advice issued by public health agencies. This public health approach reifies the notion of the home as an exceptional private space that exists outside of the possibility of COVID-19 transmission, obscuring the reality of the high risk of transmission in some households. 8 We argue that the manifestation of the public/private distinction in the COVID-19 response is …

Where Is The “Public” In American Public Health? Moving From Individual Responsibility To Collective Action, Cecília Tomori, Dabney P. Evans, Aziza Ahmed, Aparna Nair, Benjamin Mason Meier

Faculty Scholarship

American individualism continues to prove incommensurate to the public health challenge of COVID-19. Where the previous US Administration silenced public health science, neglected rising inequalities, and undermined global solidarity in the early pandemic response, the Biden Administration has sought to take action to respond to the ongoing pandemic. However, the Administration's overwhelming focus on individual responsibility over population-level policy stands in sharp contrast to fundamental tenets of public health that emphasize “what we, as a society, do collectively to assure the conditions for people to be healthy”. When this misalignment of individual responsibility and public health initially became clear with …

Risk Tradeoffs And Equitable Decision-Making In The Covid-19 Pandemic, Lawrence O. Gostin, Sarah A. Wetter

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, societies have faced agonizing decisions about whether to close schools, shutter businesses, delay nonemergency health care, restrict travel, and authorize the use of emergency Covid-19 countermeasures under limited scientific understanding. Measures to control the spread of COVID-19 have disrupted our health, educational, and economic systems, tarnished our mental health, and took away our cherished time with family and friends. Conflicting advice from health agencies on the utility of public health measures left us wondering, was it all worth it? We still do not have all the answers to guide us through difficult risk-risk …

Access To Medicines And Pharmaceutical Patents: Fulfilling The Promise Of Trips Article 31bis, Ezinne Miriam Igbokwe, Andrea Tosato

All Faculty Scholarship

The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) is one of the cornerstones of the World Trade Organization (WTO). TRIPS requires all WTO member countries (Members) to adopt minimum standards for the protection of intellectual property (IP). This international treaty is highly controversial. Its critics claim that TRIPS imposes a wealth transfer from poorer Members (net IP importers) to richer ones (net IP exporters). Its supporters maintain that trade between developing and developed economies cannot thrive without an internationally-harmonized IP framework. The most contentious issue has long been the impact of the TRIPS patents regime on access to medicines. …

The Impact On Crime Rate During A Period Of Covid-19 Induced Jail Booking Restrictions, Nathan A. Jendrick

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

COVID-19 has become a catalyst for profound changes not just in public health but in criminal justice as well. To reduce the close-quarters populations of correctional facilities in an effort to reduce the spread of the virus, law enforcement administrators in the Pacific Northwest have significantly limited the opportunity to make custodial arrests of criminal suspects. The effect on crime rate by not booking suspected criminals for misdemeanor and felony crimes alike remained largely unstudied. To assess this intervention, a paired samples t-test was used after acquiring call volume data for 13 crime types from the dispatch communications center of …

Where's The Beef? Meat Shortages, Farmer Needs, And Long-Term Recovery Policies In A Pandemic Era, Kim Vu-Dinh

Faculty Scholarship

COVID-19 not only affected every hospital bed in the nation--if not the world; it also affected nearly every dinner table in America and beyond. Supply chain disruptions caused by the pandemic highlighted deep-seated problems with how we get our meat, and how difficult we make it for American farmers to sell to the family next door. Within a few months of the first reported case in the US, hundreds of workers from just two meat-processing plants on American shores became infected with COVID-19, and imports from around the world came to a standstill as factories and shipping companies were forced …

Federal Courts’ Recalcitrance In Refusing To Certify State Law Covid-19 Business Interruption Insurance Issues, Christopher French

Journal Articles

Over 2,000 COVID-19 business interruption insurance cases have been filed in state and federal courts the past two years with most of the cases filed in or removed to federal courts. The cases are governed by state law. Rather than certify the novel state law issues presented in the cases to the respective state supreme courts that ultimately will determine the law applicable in the cases, each of the eight federal circuit courts to issue decisions on the merits in such cases to date has done so by making an Erie guess regarding how the controlling state supreme courts would …

Covid-19, Churches, And Culture Wars, John D. Inazu

Scholarship@WashULaw

The First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause often requires courts to balance competing interests of the highest order. On the one hand, the Constitution recognizes the free exercise of religion as a fundamental right. On the other hand, the government sometimes has compelling reasons for limiting free exercise, especially in situations involving dangers to health and safety. The shutdown and social distancing orders issued during the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic not only restricted free exercise but also limited what many people consider to be the core of that exercise: religious worship. But the orders did so in order to …

Abortion Experts, Aziza Ahmed

Faculty Scholarship

The COVID-19 pandemic, and the overturning of Roe v. Wade,¹ has intensified the fight for access to medication abortion. ² As state governors put emergency orders into place limiting health care provisions to essential services, some also limited access to abortion, designating it a nonessential service. ³ In the face of these challenges, women's health advocates, in keeping with prior advocacy, have called for greater access to medication abortion.⁴ The increased reliance on telemedicine during the COVID-19 pandemic provides new possibilities for the provision of abortion medication that do not rely on a patient engaging in-person at a …

Securitizing Notes Of Small Businesses And Needy Workers, Tamar Frankel

Faculty Scholarship

Businesses, whether large ones or small ones, such as restaurants and small shops, are presently closed and some of their employees have been laid off.¹ Currently, the government is lending money to these small businesses² and the now unemployed workers for their sustenance. It then collects the payments from some of the borrowers and the source of the rest of the money is taxes.³ Since not all, or perhaps only a few, small businesses own real estate, they might sign notes promising to repay the loans but can offer no asset backing. Presumably, the nation’s financial deficit …

Stemming The Shadow Pandemic: Integrating Sociolegal Services In Contact Tracing And Beyond, Medha D. Makhlouf

Faculty Scholarly Works

The COVID-19 pandemic has shed light on the challenges of complying with public health guidance to isolate or quarantine without access to adequate income, housing, food, and other resources. When people cannot safely isolate or quarantine during an outbreak of infectious disease, a critical public health strategy fails. This article proposes integrating sociolegal needs screening and services into contact tracing as a way to mitigate public health harms and pandemic-related health inequities.

Spurring Digital Transformation In Singapore's Legal Industry, Xin Juan Chua, Steven M. Miller

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

COVID-19 has transformed the way we live and work. It has caused the processes and operations of businesses and organisations to be restructured, as well as transformed business models. A 2020 McKinsey Global survey reported that companies all over the world claim they have accelerated the digitalisation of their customer and supply-chain interactions, as well as their internal operations, by three to four years. They also said they thought the share of digital or digitally enabled products in their portfolios has advanced by seven years. While technology transformation is not new to the legal profession, COVID-19 has cemented the importance …

The Jury Trial Reinvented, Christopher Robertson, Michael Shammas

Faculty Scholarship

The Framers of the Sixth and Seventh Amendments to the United States Constitution recognized that jury trials were essential for maintaining democratic legitimacy and avoiding epistemic crises. As an institution, the jury trial is purpose-built to engage citizens in the process of deliberative, participatory democracy with ground rules. The jury trial provides a carefully constructed setting aimed at sorting truth from falsehood.

Despite its value, the jury trial has been under assault for decades. Concededly, jury trials can sometimes be inefficient, unreliable, unpredictable, and impractical. The COVID–19 pandemic rendered most physical jury trials unworkable but spurred some courts to begin …

Public Health And The Power To Exclude: Immigrant Expulsions At The Border, Sarah R. Sherman-Stokes

Faculty Scholarship

We are presently in the midst of a crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, as Courts, and indeed the Biden Administration, are struggling to manage thousands of immigrants waiting to seek asylum in the midst of a global pandemic. Beginning in March of 2020, against the advice of public health experts, the U.S. Government closed the southern U.S.-Mexico border, disproportionately impacting would-be asylum seekers from Central America, who are now immediately expelled from the United States should they reach the border under a process known as “Title 42.” Not only do these expulsions lack a legitimate public health rationale, but they …

Effects Of Political Versus Expert Messaging On Vaccination Intentions Of Trump Voters, Christopher Robertson, Keith Bentele, Beth Meyerson, Alexander Wood, Jacqueline Salwa

Faculty Scholarship

To increase COVID-19 vaccine uptake in resistant populations, such as Republicans, focus groups suggest that it is best to de-politicize the issue by sharing five facts from a public health expert. Yet polls suggest that Trump voters trust former President Donald Trump for medical advice more than they trust experts. We conducted an online, randomized, national experiment among 387 non-vaccinated Trump voters, using two brief audiovisual artifacts from Spring 2021, either facts delivered by an expert versus political claims delivered by President Trump. Relative to the control group, Trump voters who viewed the video of Trump endorsing the vaccine were …

Tokyo 2020: A Tale Of Two Cities, Tan K. B. Eugene

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In a commentary, SMU Associate Professor of Law Eugene Tan, who was a team manager at the 2002 Busan Asian Games and 2004 Athens Olympics, discussed the Olympics Tokyo 2020 and how it showed indomitable human spirit amid the pandemic. Assoc Prof Tan also discussed and explored how Singapore can develop sustainable pathways that would enable our athletes to continue having competitive sporting careers into their late 20s and 30s.

Standard Racism: Trying To Use “Crisis Standards Of Care” In The Covid-19 Pandemic, George J. Annas, Sondra S. Crosby

Faculty Scholarship

Lowering the standard of care in a pandemic is a recipe for inferior care and discrimination. Wealthy white patients will continue to get “standard of care” medicine, while the poor and racial minorities (especially black and brown people) will get what is openly described as substandard care rationalized by the assertion that substandard care is all that we can deliver to them in a crisis. (IOM Citation2009) Paul Farmer’s experience in responding to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa is a shocking, if extreme, example of how dangerous to patients this practice is. White patients were treated with the …

One Year On Since Ge2020: Thinking Afresh For The Post-Covid Era, Tan K. B. Eugene

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In a commentary, SMU Associate Professor of Law Eugene Tan opined that even as political competition in Singapore sharpens, a deeper understanding and broader consensus must develop on critical issues. He believes that remaking Singapore to be a fairer, more just, and compassionate society in a post-Covid world is a key responsibility for Parliament.

Data Privacy Issues In West Virginia And Beyond: A Comprehensive Overview, Jena Martin

Consumer Law Scholarship

This white paper was commissioned by the Center for Consumer Law and Education, a joint initiative launched by West Virginia University and Marshall University to “coordinate the development of consumer law, policy, and education research to support and serve consumers.”

As such, this paper has a dual purpose. First, it provides a comprehensive overview of the many different legal issues that affect data privacy concerns (both nationally and in West Virginia). Second, it documents and discusses the result of a survey and specific focus groups that were undertaken throughout the fall of 2019 into January 2020 where individuals within the …

Designing An Independent Public Health Agency, Jacqueline Salwa, Christopher Robertson

Faculty Scholarship

We believe that Congress should act on a bipartisan basis to fix U.S. public health institutions. Legislators could decide to merely buttress current institutions, as former commissioners have suggested be done for the FDA.1 Alternatively, legislators could consider a broad reorganization of public health functions and create a superagency, whose purview would include everything from the approval of drugs and devices to the maintenance of national stockpiles of protective equipment.

How To Build More Equitable Vaccine Distribution Technology, Laura M. Moy, Yael Cannon

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The COVID-19 pandemic and the distribution of vaccines that promise to bring it to an end have spotlighted inequities in our nation’s healthcare system. But the vaccine distribution problem illustrates a peculiar fact of our digital era: just how hard it is to ensure equitable delivery of services via the internet. This is especially the case when distributing a scarce critical resource as quickly as possible on a massive scale.

In this Brookings Institution article, Professors Laura Moy and Yael Cannon argue that digital infrastructure is a critical determinant of health, and call for the restructuring of online vaccine appointment …

How The Biden Administration Can Reinvigorate Global Health Security, Institutions, And Governance, Lawrence O. Gostin, Eric A. Friedman, Sarah A. Wetter

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The tragedy of COVID-19 can be fertile soil for deep structural reforms. President Biden can both bolster the immediate responses to COVID-19 and its vast ramifications, and spearhead lasting changes to create a healthier and safer world, from which the United States would richly benefit. The agenda we propose for President Biden is ambitious, yet US. bold leadership on global health will benefit all people, including Americans, and is in the U.S. national interest

Along with responding to the COVID-19 domestically, the Biden administration should enhance U.S.-initiatives home, expanding the Global Health Security Agenda and restoring and reinvigorating the PREDICT …

Addressing Public Health’S Failings During Year One Of Covid-19, George J. Annas, Sandro Galea

Faculty Scholarship

By almost any measure, public health fell short during 2020. In retrospect, the list of what public health professionals, including federal and state public health officials, public health practitioners, and academics, could have done better is easy to articulate, and has already been the subject of angry books about the disasterous responses to the pandemic in Europe and the US [1,2]. It falls to all of us to pause, reflect, and ask: how do we move forward? We have five suggestions.

Changing Lanes: Tax Relief For Commuters, Hayes R. Holderness

Law Faculty Publications

Tax law reaches all parts of life, and societal expectations about life's activities often affect how the law is applied. As those expectations change, application of the law should be expected to change in turn. This essay highlights changing societal views about commuting, particularly as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, to demonstrate how even long-standing positions under the tax law can be quickly uprooted. Specifically, as working from home becomes standard, taxpayers should be afforded tax relief when required to commute into the workplace, despite the fact that the tax law traditionally has rejected such relief.

Forgotten On The Frontlines: The Plight Of Direct Care Workers During Covid-19, John D. Blum, Shawn R. Mathis

Faculty Publications & Other Works

No abstract provided.

Pandemic Politics, Public Health, And The Fda, Jordan Paradise, Becky Bavlsik

Faculty Publications & Other Works

No abstract provided.