Law Commons^™

Taxes As Pandemic Controls, Ashley C. Craig, James R. Hines Jr.

Articles

Tax policy can play important roles in limiting the spread of communicable disease and in managing the economic fallout of a pandemic. Taxes on business activities that bring workers or customers into close contact with each other offer efficient alternatives to broad regulatory measures, such as shutdowns, that have been effective but enormously costly. Corrective taxation also helps raise the revenue required to cover elevated government expenditure during a pandemic. Moreover, the restricted consumer choice that accompanies a pandemic reduces the welfare cost of raising tax revenue from higher-income taxpayers, making it a good time for deficit closure. Current U.S. …

FacebookʼS Latest Attempt To Address Vaccine Misinformation — And Why ItʼS Not Enough, Ana Santos Rutschman

All Faculty Scholarship

On October 13, 2020 Facebook announced the adoption of a series of measures to promote vaccine trust “while prohibiting ads with misinformation that could harm public health efforts.” In the post written by Kang-Xing Jin (head of health) and Rob Leathern (director of product management), the company explained that the new measures were designed with an emphasis on encouraging widespread use of this yearʼs flu vaccine, as well as in anticipation of potential COVID-19 vaccines becoming available in the near future.

The changes focus mainly on the establishment of a multiprong informational campaign about the seasonal flu vaccine, which includes …

State Regulation Of Religion: The Effect Of Religious Freedom On Muslims' Religiosity, Hannah M. Ridge

Political Science Faculty Articles and Research

Substantial scholarship argues that regulation of religion suppresses religiosity in a community by reducing individuals’ satisfaction with their religious experience. To date this research has assumed that regulations are enforced on and affect religious communities uniformly. It has also focused heavily on Western Christian populations and aggregated national data. We suggest that state regulation of religious communities and behaviours impacts citizens differently based on their affiliation. Using individual-level assessments of freedom and religiosity from Muslim-majority countries, we show that, at the individual level, restricting freedom suppresses religious belief and behaviour. Restrictions on religious minorities, however, can increase religiosity. As such, …

Medical Marijuana: Implications Of Evolving Trends In Regulation, Florence Shu-Acquaye

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Encouraging Entrepreneurship And Innovation Through Regulatory Democratization, Seth C. Oranburg

Law Faculty Scholarship

[Excerpt] "Entrepreneurship provides a path to prosperity for many people. In particular, women and minorities prefer entrepreneurship as their path to achieve the American Dream. In their striving, their startups and small businesses benefit our entire society. Entrepreneurial innovation has a positive impact on social welfare. For these reasons, the federal government has implemented numerous policies designed to support small businesses and promote startup innovation."

Revisiting The Automation Tax Debate In Light Of Covid-19 And Resulting Structural Unemployment, Vincent Ooi

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

As lockdowns ease around the globe and businesses reopen, the threat of jobs being automated by machines and workers being displaced as a result has significantly increased. Businesses must keep the number of workers on site to a minimum to comply with safe distancing measures. Under these constraints while social distancing remains the norm, automation might be the way forward for companies that still want to continue production while minimising human contact. The threat of a workforce being replaced by robots and automation, a threat that has already alarmed the labour movement, is heightened with Covid-19. There will be considerable …

What Role Can Regulations Play? A South African Public Law Perspective On The Potential Response Through Regulations To Constitutional Reservations About The Copyright Amendment Bill, B-13b Of 2017, Jonathan Klaaren

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

This working paper addresses several issues in South African law relevant to determining whether and to what extent regulations may address genuine problems in the Copyright Amendment Bill [CAB]. Regulations are of course not yet drafted for this Bill and the Bill remains a Bill and is not yet an Act. Indeed, as discussed further below, the Bill is currently under consideration in Parliament as part of a section 79 process. In addition to its focus on the CAB, this paper identifies a set of emerging South African public law issues associated with similarly situated legislation.

After a background section …

Deploying Machine Learning For A Sustainable Future, Cary Coglianese

All Faculty Scholarship

To meet the environmental challenges of a warming planet and an increasingly complex, high tech economy, government must become smarter about how it makes policies and deploys its limited resources. It specifically needs to build a robust capacity to analyze large volumes of environmental and economic data by using machine-learning algorithms to improve regulatory oversight, monitoring, and decision-making. Three challenges can be expected to drive the need for algorithmic environmental governance: more problems, less funding, and growing public demands. This paper explains why algorithmic governance will prove pivotal in meeting these challenges, but it also presents four likely obstacles that …

Telehealth For An Aging Population: How Can Law Influence Adoption Among Providers, Payors, And Patients?, Tara Sklar, Christopher Robertson

Faculty Scholarship

Telehealth continues to experience substantial investment, innovation, and unprecedented growth. However, telehealth has been slow to transform healthcare. Recent developments in telehealth technologies suggest great potential for chronic care management, mental health services, and care delivery in the home—all of which should be particularly impactful for an aging population with physical and cognitive limitations. While this alignment of technological capacity and market demand is promising, legal barriers remain for telehealth operators to scale up across large geographic areas. To better understand how federal and state law can be reformed to enable greater telehealth utilization, we review and extract lessons from …

Missouri's Residency Restrictions For Medical Marijuana Use, Royce De R. Barondes

Faculty Publications

Missouri's adoption of a constitutional amendment decriminalizing medical marijuana for state law purposes has presented numerous interstitial issues. This article examines one that Missouri's Department of Health and Senior Services ("DHSS") has attempted to address by regulation: residency requirements for qualifying patients. The current regulations add detail to the constitutional requirement that a qualifying patient be a "Missouri resident". They require that a patient must "reside [] in Missouri and not claim resident privileges in another state or country". This article concludes this aspect of the regulations is of dubious tenability.

Fda In The Time Of Covid-19, Elizabeth Mccuskey

Faculty Scholarship

Over the past century, Congress has made the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) responsible for regulating the safety and efficacy of drugs and devices being deployed in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. The FDA’s regulatory infrastructure was built for public health threats and to combat manufacturers' misinformation about treatments.

This article spotlights the ways in which FDA has been adapting to a new challenge during the COVID-19 pandemic: combating misinformation emanating from within the executive branch.

Chain Restaurant Calorie Posting Laws, Obesity, And Consumer Welfare, Charles J. Courtemanche, David Frisvold, David Jimenez-Gomez, Mariétou H. Ouayogodé, Michael Price

Institute for the Study of Free Enterprise Working Papers

The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) introduced a mandate requiring chain restaurants to post calorie counts on menus and menu boards. This paper investigates whether and why calorie posting laws work. To do so, we develop a model of calories consumed that highlights two potential channels through which mandates influence choice and outlines an empirical strategy to disentangle these alternatives. We test the predictions of our model using data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System to compare changes in body mass index (BMI), obesity, and consumer well-being in locations that implemented calorie-posting laws between 2008 and …

Considering Law And Macroeconomics, Anna Gelpern, Adam J. Levitin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The worst financial and economic crisis to hit the world’s richest economies since the Great Depression inspired a flood of scholarship that straddled the disciplines of law and macroeconomics. With few exceptions, this crisis scholarship did not set out to build a new interdisciplinary movement and did not claim the legacy of earlier efforts to mine the intersection of law and macroeconomics. What are we to make of this moment ten years on? Could Law and Macroeconomics (#LawMacro for short) be an important new turn in legal and economic thought, a casual interdisciplinary tryst on the margins of a hundred-year …

Mining The Harvard Caselaw Access Project, Felix B. Chang, Erin Mccabe, James Lee

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This Essay illustrates how machine learning can disrupt legal scholarship through the algorithmic extraction and analysis of big data. Specifically, we utilize data from Harvard Law School’s Caselaw Access Project to model how courts tackle two thorny question in antitrust: the measure of market power and the balance between antitrust and regulation.

Individual Preferences In Policy Analysis: A Normative Framework, Gabriel Weil

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Regulation In The Biden Administration, Richard J. Pierce Jr

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Professor Pierce wrote this essay in which he predicts the regulatory actions of the Biden Administration at the request of a journal that specializes in reporting on regulatory developments to readers in the UK and the EU.

Net Neutrality: An Explainer, Kincaid C. Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

Net neutrality is the idea that internet services or broadband providers should treat all content streaming through their systems the same, and providers who use their discretion to create “fast lanes,” block particular content, or throttle (slow down) internet speeds are not in keeping with how the internet ought to work.

Symposium: The Puzzling And Troubling Grant In Kisor, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

From one perspective, the Supreme Court’s decision to grant review in Kisor v. Wilkie is not surprising. Dating back at least to Justice Antonin Scalia’s 2011 concurrence in Talk America v. Michigan Bell Telephone Co., through Decker v. Northwest Environmental Defense Center in 2013 and Perez v. Mortgage Bankers Association in 2015, there’s been growing interest on the Supreme Court’s conservative wing in overturning Auer deference, or the doctrine that an agency’s interpretation of its own regulation is “controlling unless plainly erroneous or inconsistent with the regulation.” The campaign to overturn Auer v. Robbins then stalled, with the court denying …

Rebuilding The Texas Railroad Commission, James W. Coleman

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This article explains how the Railroad Commission of Texas became the world’s most prominent oil and gas regulator and how it can become the world’s role model again. It explains how the Railroad Commission built the world’s modern oil and gas industry by stopping oil and gas waste and ensuring stable prices. And it describes the crisis now facing the industry—overproduction of oil and gas is wasting resources that will be worth more in the future. The United States is emerging from the biggest oil and gas boom that the world has ever seen and its production now dwarfs that …

Minding The Gaps In Regulation Of Do-It-Yourself Biotechnology, Barbara J. Evans

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Symposium confronts the reality that genetic technologies – not just genetic tests, but tools for altering plant, animal, and human genomes – are rapidly becoming and indeed already are consumer technologies. People can experiment with and apply these technologies in disintermediated formats, potentially without the involvement of national research funding agencies, professional scientists, physicians, genetic counselors, regulators, and traditional medical product manufacturers. The framework of 20th -century medical product and practice regulations assigned each of these parties a role in promoting ethical, safe, and effective biomedical research and health care. Do-it-yourself biotechnology (DIYbio), which includes direct-to-consumer (DTC) and do-it-yourself …

The Politics Of Regulating And Disciplining Judges In Nigeria, Olabisi D. Akinkugbe

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The disciplining of judges is a sensitive and complex challenge. In Nigeria, the complexity is heightened because the process is complicated by socio-political factors and public views about the motivations for disciplining some judges, including claims of political interference by the ruling government. This Chapter argues that both judicial discipline and the work of the National Judicial Council (NJC) – the body responsible for judicial regulation in Nigeria – are caught up within Nigeria’s peculiar socio-politics, a reality that a strictly legal analysis will miss. The Chapter analyzes contemporary challenges and controversies associated with the complaints and discipline procedure in …

Robots, Regulation, And The Changing Nature Of Public Space, Kristen Thomasen

All Faculty Publications

Robots are an increasingly common feature in North American public spaces. From regulations permitting broader drone use in public airspace and autonomous vehicle testing on public roads, to delivery robots roaming sidewalks in major US cities, to the announcement of Sidewalk Toronto — a plan to convert waterfront space in one of North America’s largest cities into a robotics-filled smart community — the laws regulating North American public spaces are opening up to robots. In many of these examples, the growing presence of robots in public space is associated with opportunities to improve human lives through intelligent urban design, environmental …

The Segregation Of Markets, Christian Turner

Scholarly Works

Campaign-finance reformers fear that rich donors’ money can be used disproportionately to influence the content of campaign advertising and thus, perhaps, the results of elections. In European football, UEFA has attempted to ban “financial doping,” rich owners’ use of money earned in sectors other than football to pay large sums for the best football players. Campaign-finance reform efforts and “financial fair play” rules in sport may seem like bespoke solutions to different problems. In fact, they are the same solution to the same problem. Both are attempts to ensure that power accumulated in one market is not brought into another …

Is Medicare For All The Answer? Assessing The Health Reform Gestalt As The Aca Turns 10, Nicole Huberfeld

Faculty Scholarship

As presidential candidates debate health reform, the expression “Medicare for All” (“M4A”) is on repeat, yet few appear to understand precisely what Medicare is or what M4A would mean. Even more striking is that Americans are vigorously debating health reform when the ACA – President Obama’s signature legislation and a health reform effort on a scale not seen in decades – turns 10 on March 23.

The ACA pioneered universal coverage, but it also ratcheted up health care complexity by building new scaffolding around an old foundation. This fragmented landscape has been exacerbated by a crazy quilt of implementation crafted …