Disaster Law Commons^™

Climate Migration And Displacement: A Case Study Of Puerto Rican Women In Connecticut, Camila Bustos, Bruni Pizarro, Tabitha Sookdeo

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The climate crisis is increasingly forcing people to flee their homes, whether internally or across state borders. However, existing international and domestic law does not provide sufficient protection for those forcibly displaced by extreme weather events. In 2021, the Biden administration issued an executive order and subsequently a report on the impact of climate change on migration, which marked a first step in federal policy toward recognition of the nexus between climate change and displacement. At the local level, Connecticut has already become a destination for climate-displaced people. For instance, after Hurricane Maria landed in Puerto Rico in 2017, approximately …

The Emergency Next Time, Noa Ben-Asher

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This Article offers a new conceptual framework to understand the connection between law and violence in emergencies. It is by now well-established that governments often commit state violence in times of national security crisis by implementing excessive emergency measures. The Article calls this type of legal violence “Emergency-Affirming Violence.” But Emergency Violence can also be committed through governmental non-action. This type of violence, which this Article calls, “Emergency-Denying Violence,” has manifested in the crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Article offers a taxonomy to better understand the phenomenon of Emergency Violence. Using 9/11 and COVID-19 as examples, the Article proposes …

Disaster Mitigation Through Land Use Strategies, John R. Nolon

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The persistent question this book raises is who should decide whether and how to mitigate the damages caused by natural disasters. Our understandable preoccupation with response, recovery, and rebuilding makes it hard to focus on this question as a central, even relevant, one. But it persists, nonetheless. The high-profile “blame game” played following Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of the Gulf Coast is emblematic. In pointing fingers first at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), then at the city of New Orleans, and then at the state of Louisiana, public officials exhibited an appalling lack of understanding of the roles that each …