Digital Commons Network^™

Adapting Private Law For Climate Change Adaptation, Jim Rossi, J. B. Ruhl

Vanderbilt Law Review

The private law of torts, property, and contracts will and should play an important role in resolving disputes regarding how private individuals and entities respond to and manage the harms of climate change that cannot be avoided through mitigation (known in climate change policy dialogue as “adaptation”). While adaptation is commonly presented as a problem needing legislative solutions, this Article presents a novel and overdue case for private law to take climate adaptation seriously.

To date, the role of private law is a significant blind spot in scholarly discussions of climate adaptation. Litigation invoking common-law doctrines in climate adaption disputes …

Pandemics And The Protection Of Privacy And Personal Information: Issues Concerning The Restriction On The Right To Privacy In Emergencies, Fumio Shimpo

Japanese Society and Culture

This article focuses on issues which need to be considered in aiming to ensure both the effectiveness of infectious disease control measures and the protection of the right to privacy from the following perspectives.

(1) Issues regarding the restriction of the right to privacy in emergency situations, including (i) the types of measures taken in emergency situations and issues with respect to the restriction of the right to privacy in emergency situations, (ii) the normalisation, constancy and fixation of exceptional measures in emergency situations, (iii) dual-use and use for purposes different from those originally intended, (iv) acquisition of secondary information …

Don’T Make Them Martyrs: Empowering Children In The Foster Care & Juvenile Justice Systems Through Covid-19 Vaccine Consenting Rights, Victoria Kalumbi

Minnesota Journal of Law & Inequality

No abstract provided.

Biased But Reasonable: Bias Under The Cover Of Standard Of Care, Maytal Gilboa

Georgia Law Review

Inequities in the distribution of healthcare are widely acknowledged to plague the United States healthcare system. Controversies as to whether anti-discrimination law allows individuals to bring lawsuits with respect to implicit rather than intentional bias render negligence law an important avenue for redressing harms caused by implicit bias in medical care. Yet, as this Article argues, the focus of negligence law on medical standards of care to define the boundaries of healthcare providers’ legal duty of care prevents the law from adequately deterring implicit bias and leaves patients harmed by biased treatment decisions without redress for their losses, so long …

Force Majeure & Covid-19: A Clause Changed?, Claudia Petcu

DePaul Business & Commercial Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Continuing Principled Sentencing Reform And Winding Back Mass Incarceration Against The Backdrop Of America’S Surge In Violent Crime, Mirko Bagaric, Jennifer Svilar, Brienna Bagaric

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Policing Pregnancy "Crimes", Valena Beety, Jennifer Oliva

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization held that there is no right to abortion healthcare under the United States Constitution. This Essay details how states prosecuted pregnant people for pregnancy behaviors and speculative fetal harms prior to the Dobbs decision. In this connection, it also identifies two, related post-Dobbs concerns: (1) that states will ramp up their policing of pregnancy behaviors and (2) that prosecutors will attempt to substantiate these charges by relying on invalid scientific evidence. This Essay examines the faulty forensic science that states have used to support fetal harm allegations and reminds …

Humans In The Loop, Rebecca Crootof, Margot E. Kaminski, W. Nicholson Price Ii, Professor Of Law

Vanderbilt Law Review

From lethal drones to cancer diagnostics, humans are increasingly working with complex and artificially intelligent algorithms to make decisions which affect human lives, raising questions about how best to regulate these “human-in-the-loop” systems. We make four contributions to the discourse.

First, contrary to the popular narrative, law is already profoundly and often problematically involved in governing human-in-the-loop systems: it regularly affects whether humans are retained in or removed from the loop. Second, we identify “the MABA-MABA trap,” which occurs when policymakers attempt to address concerns about algorithmic incapacities by inserting a human into a decisionmaking process. Regardless of whether the …

Mitigating Zoonotic Disease Threats To Prevent Future Pandemics: A Critical Analysis Of Policy Favoring The Closures Of Wildlife Markets In Latin America, Melany J. Danielson

University of Miami Inter-American Law Review

The Preventing Future Pandemics Act was introduced to mitigate zoonotic disease threats around the world by focusing policy efforts on the closure of wildlife markets that gave rise to COVID–19. This Note challenges the efficacy of wildlife market closure policy by considering cultural, socioeconomic, and legal factors for the existence of wildlife market within megadiverse countries in Latin America. Based on scientific research on the animal-to-human interface and zoonotic disease transmission, this Note suggests effective policy should incorporate a targeted species ban for reservoir species, improved sanitary measures and disease surveillance, and wildlife trafficking prevention. Ultimately, this Note calls for …

Chevron: Fueling The Right Against Title 42 And The Denial Of U.S. Asylum Rights, Nicholas Pierre-Paul

University of Miami Inter-American Law Review

This Note was inspired by the questionable treatment of Haitian asylum seekers in Del Rio, Texas, where horseback U.S. officials charged at them using reins as whips, before immediately deporting them back to Haiti. The U.S. government justified its actions by claiming that Title 42 permits U.S. officials to prohibit the entry of individuals when there is a danger of introducing certain diseases, such as COVID-19. However, Title 42 conflicts with the United States’ codified commitment to the principle of non-refoulment, prohibiting it from returning certain refugees to a country where their life or freedom would be threatened. Accordingly, the …

Navigating The Covid-19 Eviction Crisis: The Cdc's Emergency Eviction Moratorium And Judicial Deference, Deepika Chandrashekar

Journal of the National Association of Administrative Law Judiciary

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated America’s pre-pandemic affordable housing crisis and millions of renters have paid the price. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a nationwide eviction moratorium in September of 2020 due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. While the moratorium was originally intended to be temporary, the CDC under the Biden administration was forced to extend the moratorium in August of 2021 due to a lack of congressional action. The CDC is empowered by the Public Health Service Act to take actions necessary to prevent the spread of communicable diseases, and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic constitutes …

Untested Drugs To Treat Ebola: A Case Of Uncompassionatecompassionate Use?, Stacey B. Lee J.D.

Ohio Northern University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Can Health Care Facilities Require Their Employees To Receivethe Influenza Vaccine?, Rachel K. Baden

Ohio Northern University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Let's Talk Dirty: Revealing The United States Sanitation Crisis And Its Disproportionate Effect On Poor And Minority Communities, Lindsay Norton

Villanova Environmental Law Journal (1991 - )

No abstract provided.

Covid Vaccines And Intellectual Property Rights: Evaluating The Potential For National Legislation Implementing Global Patent Waivers, Ashley Dabiere

Duke Law & Technology Review

Debates over the proper scope of intellectual property protections during the COVID-19 pandemic have occupied newspaper headlines since the first vaccines were developed nearly three years ago. Scholars and key politicians from several nations considered the implementation of a global patent waiver in an effort to make the vaccines more widely available in developing parts of the world. Although the question of whether such a waiver would fulfill this goal remains empirically unanswered and up for debate, the legal structure of United States patent law would make its implementation by Congress difficult given the value placed on intellectual property protections …

How Crisis Affects Crypto: Coronavirus As A Test Case, Hadar Y. Jabotinsky, Roee Sarel

UC Law Journal

Everybody is talking about cryptocurrencies. These digital tokens, which started in a one-asset market, have swiftly ballooned into a massive and diverse “cryptomarket.” The cryptomarket is still mostly unregulated, but this is about to change. With President Biden’s adoption of the Executive Order on Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets, regulatory initiatives are being adopted abroad, and global regulation looms ahead. In light of the expected regulatory changes, two important questions emerge: is there a clear rationale for legal intervention in the cryptomarket? And if so, what type of regulation is optimal?

This Article is the first to consider how …

Immigration Law’S Boundary Problem: Determining The Scope Of Executive Discretion, Peter Margulies

UC Law Journal

In immigration law, executive discretion has become contested terrain. Courts, officials, and scholars have rarely distinguished between regulatory discretion, which facilitates exclusion and removal of noncitizens, and protective discretion, which safeguards noncitizens’ reliance interests. Moreover, courts have long discerned an internal-external divide in discretion, deferring to executive measures that exclude noncitizens abroad, while reducing deference for measures concerning noncitizens who have already entered the United States. Immigration law needs a cohesive framework for executive discretion. This Article suggests a stewardship model to fill that gap.

Recent developments have emphasized the need for a coherent model of discretion. The Trump Administration …

When Further Incarceration Is No Longer In The Interest Of Justice: Instituting A Federal Prosecutor-Initiated Resentencing Framework, Lydia Tonozzi

UC Law Journal

The dire state of the prison population in the United States has become common knowledge both at home and abroad. Mass incarceration in the United States has been caused by nearly four decades of retributive criminal justice policies that do little to reduce crime. This mass incarceration imposes a multitude of costs on American society, both financially and socially. Furthermore, congressional goals to reduce crime rates are necessarily undermined by punitive policies at the federal level. The history of California’s penal system during the same time frame parallels the federal history. Yet in 2017, California began to remedy this history …

Colorblind Nationalism And The Limits Of Citizenship, Ming Hsu Chen

Cardozo Law Review

Policymakers and lawyers posit formal citizenship as the key to inclusion. Rather than presume that formal citizenship will necessarily promote equality, this Article examines the relationship between citizenship, racial equality, and nationalism. It asks: What role does formal citizenship play in excluding noncitizens and Asian, Latinx, and Muslim citizens racialized as foreigners? What effects does it have on the meaning of being American as a non-White citizen? The Article argues that commitments to colorblind equality and democratic self-governance of the nation stand in contradiction to aspirations to protect all persons within the nation. Consequently, individual rights designed to remedy racial …

Considering Vaccination Status, Govind Persad

UC Law Journal

This Article examines whether policies—sometimes termed “vaccine mandates” or “vaccine requirements”— that consider vaccination status as a condition of employment, receipt of goods and services, or educational or other activity for participation are legally permitted, and whether such policies may even sometimes be legally required. It does so with particular reference to COVID-19 vaccines.

Part I explains the legality of private actors, such as employers or private universities, considering vaccination status, and concludes that such consideration is almost always legally permissible unless foreclosed by specific state legislation. Part II examines the consideration of vaccination status by state or federal policy. …

Impact Of Social Media  On Public Perception Of Government Covid-19 Response Efforts, Taher Taher

Theses and Dissertations

This research aims to understand this phenomenon to provide insights into how governments can perform better in times of crisis regarding social media and its impact on public opinion. This research aims to understand how social media impacts public perception of government COVID-19 response efforts by studying Facebook comments, likes, and reactions (emoticons).

The study was based on data gathered from Facebook comments on the daily infographic COVID-19 statistics from the official site of the Ministry of Health and Population. The sampling frame is the 52 weeks of 2020, January to December, through random sampling resulting in 546 comments. The …

Harmful Speech And The Covid-19 Penumbra, Kenneth Grad, Amanda Turnbull

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

We make two central claims in this essay. First, the themes of malinformation have remained remarkably consistent across pandemics. What has changed is only the manner of their spread through evolving technologies and globalization. Thus, as with pandemic preparedness more generally, our failure to take proactive measures reflects a failure to heed the lessons of the past. Second, we argue that the COVID-19 pandemic presents a unique opportunity to tackle online falsehoods and mitigate their impact in the future.

We proceed in three parts. Part one addresses the harmful speech that inevitably follows in pandemic’s wake. We illustrate this through …

Digital Surveillance Of Covid-19: Privacy And Equity Considerations, Elaine Gibson, Cal Dewolfe, Ilana Luther

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

In this paper, we examine the potentially deleterious effects of surveillance on vulnerable Canadians. A wide range of digital surveillance technologies have either been deployed or considered for deployment both in Canada and around the world in response to the international emergency created by the COVID-19 pandemic. Some of these technologies are highly effective in predicting or identifying individual cases and/or outbreaks; others assist in tracing contacts or enforcing compliance with quarantine and isolation measures. However, there are necessarily risks associated with their deployment. First are the infringements on privacy rights of citizens and groups. Second, these technologies run the …

Covid-19 Policies & Their Impact On Housing And Health Outcomes In The City Of Chicago, Khushbu Patel

DePaul Journal of Health Care Law

The COVID-19 mandates and policies that were implemented by both the state of Illinois and the City of Chicago, such as the eviction moratorium, dramatically improved health outcomes by alleviating the financial stress of many households. Discussing social determinants of health and evaluating the impact that each social determinant had on housing and health outcomes allows for an in-depth look at the overall concept of housing in Chicago and the health outcomes of low-income individuals. Comparing the housing laws in place before COVID-19 at the federal, state, and local levels allows for analyzing the impact of the COVID-19 policies and …

Liability For Deadly Failure: Rejecting The Push For Prep Act Preemption And Restraining Prep Act Immunity For Senior Living Facilities And Nursing Homes, Mai R. Contino

Pepperdine Law Review

In the wake of COVID-19, there has been a surge of wrongful death cases filed by plaintiff families in state courts. These families allege that their loved one contracted and died from COVID-19 because the nursing home or senior living facility at which their loved one resided failed to take proper COVID-19 prevention measures. In response, defendant facilities have removed these actions to federal court, arguing that the PREP Act preempts plaintiffs’ state law claims and grants facilities immunity from liability for loss related to qualified actions taken during a public health emergency. This Comment rejects facilities’ push for preemption …

Strengthening A One Health Approach To Emerging Zoonoses, Samira Mubareka, John Amuasi, Arinjay Banerjee, Hélène Carabin, Joe Copper Jack, Claire Jardine, Bogdan Jaroszewicz, Greg Keefe, Jonathon Kotwa, Susan Kutz, Deborah Mcgregor, Anne Mease, Lily Nicholson, Katarzyna Nowak, Brad Pickering, Maureen Reed, Johanne Saint-Charles, Katarzyna Simonienko, Trevor Smith, J. Scott Weese, E. Jane Parmley

Articles & Book Chapters

Given the enormous global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza in Canada, and manifold other zoonotic pathogen activity, there is a pressing need for a deeper understanding of the human-animal-environment interface and the intersecting biological, ecological, and societal factors contributing to the emergence, spread, and impact of zoonotic diseases. We aim to apply a One Health approach to pressing issues related to emerging zoonoses, and propose a functional framework of interconnected but distinct groups of recommendations around strategy and governance, technical leadership (operations), equity, education and research for a One Health approach and Action Plan …

The Future Of Pandemics: Land Use Controls As Means Of Preventing Zoonotic Disease, Bailey Andree

Pace International Law Review

Zoonotic diseases are increasing in frequency as climate change worsens around the world, with the recent COVID-19 pandemic highlighting the inadequate mechanisms in place to counteract disease spread. This article reviews various zoonotic diseases and their patterns of spread, highlighting land use change as the key driver of disease to demonstrate the need for legal intervention. International land use law is a little-developed subsect of environmental law that holds the key to combating this disease spread, and this article proposes solutions through this legal lens. Land use techniques which may be used to combat disease spread include conservation laws, setback …

Wild Cards In Natural Resource Planning: High Impact Surprises That Shape The Future, Dr. David Bengston

Natural Resources Journal

Wild cards are improbable, high impact events. Such events, like the COVID-19 pandemic, have the ability to shape policy by upending entire systems and paradigms. Unfortunately, long-term planning and policymaking rarely account for wild card events. Instead, planning and policymaking typically assume that existing trends will continue without major disruption. Moreover, adequately planning for potential wild card events is challenging because they are inherently difficult to predict. However, planning for wild card events in natural resources and environmental policymaking is vital as global developments, such as climate change, create more extreme conditions and challenges. This review, (1) defines and characterizes …

Black Lives Monitored, Chaz Arnett

Faculty Scholarship

The police killing of George Floyd added fuel to the simmering flames of racial injustice in America following a string of similarly violent executions during a global pandemic that disproportionately ravaged the health and economic security of Black families and communities. The confluence of these painful realities exposed deep vulnerabilities and renewed a reckoning with the long unfulfilled promise of racial equality, inspiring large-scale protests around the country and across the globe. As with prior movements for racial justice, from slavery abolition to the civil rights movement’s demand to end Jim Crow, protests have been met with extreme force, either …

Disciplining Doctors: A Call For Caution When Responding To Physicians' Counter-Consensus Speech In The Time Of Covid-19, Timothy Macdonnell

Scholarly Articles

The COVID-19 pandemic affected nearly every aspect of life in the United States, including most notably, work-life, home-life, and community-life. During the pandemic, the government took extraordinary steps to try and reduce the spread of the disease by closing businesses, mandating the wearing of masks, and requiring vaccines. Government officials repeatedly justified their actions by stating that they were "following the science." However not all members of the scientific/medical community agreed with these actions. Some of these counter-consensus opinions were labeled mis/dis/mal/information.

As the COVID-19 pandemic dragged on, calls to punish doctors for COVID-19 misinformation increased. Some doctors who claimed …