Digital Commons Network^™

A Pandemic Instrument Can Start Turning Collective Problems Into Collective Solutions By Governing The Common-Pool Resource Of Antimicrobial Effectiveness, Isaac Weldon, Kathy Liddell, Susan Rogers Van Katwyk, Steven J. Hoffman, Timo Minssen, Kevin Outterson, Stephanie Palmer, A. M. Viens, Jorge Viñuales

Faculty Scholarship

To address the complex challenge of global antimicrobial resistance (AMR), a pandemic treaty should include mechanisms that 1) equitably address the access gap for antimicrobials, diagnostic technologies, and alternative therapies; 2) equitably conserve antimicrobials to sustain effectiveness and access across time and space; 3) equitably finance the investment, discovery, development, and distribution of new technologies; and 4) equitably finance and establish greater upstream and midstream infection prevention measures globally. Biodiversity, climate, and nuclear governance offer lessons for addressing these challenges.

Are Constitutional Rights Enough? An Empirical Assessment Of Racial Bias In Police Stops, Michael Frakes, Rohit Asirvatham

Faculty Scholarship

This Article empirically tests the conventional wisdom that a permissive constitutional standard bearing on pretextual traffic stops—such as the one announced by the Supreme Court in Whren v. United States—contributes to racial disparities in traffic stops. To gain empirical traction on this question, we look to state constitutional law. In particular, we consider a natural experiment afforded by changes in the State of Washington’s rules regarding traffic stops. Following Whren, the Washington Supreme Court first took a more restrictive stance than the U.S. Supreme Court, prohibiting pretextual stops by police officers, but later reversed course and instituted a laxer standard, …

Citizenship Disparities, Emily Ryo, Reed Humphrey

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

“Second-Class" Rhetoric, Ideology, And Doctrinal Change, Eric Ruben, Joseph Blocher

Faculty Scholarship

A common refrain in current constitutional discourse is that lawmakers and judges are systematically disfavoring certain rights. This allegation has been made about the rights to free speech and free exercise of religion, but it is most prominent in debates about the right to keep and bear arms. Such “second-class” treatment, the argument goes, signals that the Supreme Court must intervene aggressively to police the disrespected rights. Past empirical work casts doubt on the descriptive claim that judges and policymakers are disrespecting the Second Amendment, but that simply highlights how little we know about how the second-class argument functions as …

Japan’S Transnational War Reparations Litigation: An Empirical Analysis, Timothy Webster

Faculty Scholarship

Negotiating war reparations is traditionally the province of the political branches, yet in recent decades, domestic courts have presided over hundreds of compensation lawsuits stemming from World War II. In the West, governments responded to these lawsuits with elaborate compensation mechanisms. In East Asia, by contrast, civil litigation continues apace. This Article analyzes eighty-three lawsuits filed in Japan, the epicenter of Asia’s World War II reparations movement. While many scholars criticize the passivity of Japanese courts on war-related issues, this Article detects a meaningful role for Japanese courts in the reparations process: awarding compensation, verifying facts, and allocating legal liability. …

Retooling Sanctions: China’S Challenge To The Liberal International Order, Timothy Webster

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Tom Ginsburg has produced yet another classic of transnational law, political science, and international relations. Democracies and International Law yields important insights into the democratic nature of international law but cautions that authoritarian states can apply these very legal technologies for repressive or anti-democratic purposes. Building on Ginsburg’s theories of mimicry and repurposing, this contribution highlights the role of both techniques in the creation of China’s economic sanctions program. On the one hand, China has developed a basic set of tools to impose economic sanctions—a key instrument in the liberal international toolkit—on foreign entities and persons. In so doing, …

Law’S Contributions To The Mindfulness Revolution, Elizabeth F. Emens

Faculty Scholarship

These are phenomenally challenging times. Mindfulness is a tool that can help lawyers support themselves, each other, their clients, and their collaborators in the hard work needed to build community and take action. For these and other reasons, mindfulness has made major inroads into law and legal institutions. Law firms, law schools, and courthouses offer training in mindfulness meditation to support the cognitive clarity and emotional self-regulation necessary for the demanding work of analyzing problems, resolving conflicts, overcoming bias, and doing justice. A growing literature, from empirical social science to legal scholarship, catalogs these and other benefits of mindfulness for …

Transparency Deserts, Christina Koningisor

Faculty Scholarship

Few contest the importance of a robust transparency regime in a democratic system of government. In the United States, the “crown jewel” of this regime is the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Yet despite widespread agreement about the importance of transparency in government, few are satisfied with FOIA. Since its enactment, the statute has engendered criticism from transparency advocates and critics alike for insufficiently serving the needs of both the public and the government. Legal scholars have widely documented these flaws in the federal public records law. In contrast, scholars have paid comparatively little attention to transparency laws at the …

In Search Of The Public Interest, Jodi L. Short

Faculty Scholarship

“Public interest” standards in statutory delegations to agencies represent the greatest hopes and the darkest fears of the U.S. administrative state. On the one hand, the public interest standard provides a vessel for agencies to infuse policymaking with the moral and ethical commitments of the community. On the other hand, regulation in the public interest opens the door to the arbitrary exercise of tyrannical state power. Despite the lofty aspirations and ominous warnings about regulation in the public interest, little is known about how agencies actually decide what is in the public interest when charged by statute to do so. …

Standing For Rivers, Mountains - And Trees - In The Anthropocene, David Takacs

Faculty Scholarship

In his well-known article, Should Trees Have Standing?—Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects, Professor Christopher Stone proposed that courts grant nonhuman entities standing as plaintiffs so their interests may directly represented in court. In this Article, I review Stone’s ideas about standing and our relationship with the natural environment and describe the current, burgeoning, widespread trend toward granting not just standing, but legal rights and legal personhood to rivers, mountains, and other natural entities. I analyze the ways in which courts and legislatures in New Zealand, Australia, Colombia, and elsewhere are addressing concerns similar to Stone’s with expansive, even radical …

The Center Cannot Hold: Zoom As A Potemkin Village, Hadar Aviram

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Personal Jurisdiction, Comparativism, And Ford, Scott Dodson

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Ai Governance In The Financial Industry, Robin C. Feldman, Kara Stein

Faculty Scholarship

Legal regimes in the United States generally conceptualize obligations as attaching along one of two pathways: through the entity or the individual. Although these dual conceptualizations made sense in an ordinary pre-modem world, they no longer capture the financial system land­ scape, now that artificial intelligence has entered the scene. Neither person nor entity, artificial intelligence is an activity or a capacity, something that mediates relations between individuals and entities. And whether we like it or not, artificial intelligence has already reshaped financial markets. From Robinhood, to the Flash Crash, to Twitter's Hash Crash, to the Knight Capital incident, each …

Death By Dehumanization: Prosecutorial Narratives Of Death-Sentenced Women And Lgbtq Prisoners, Jessica Sutton, John Mills, Jennifer Merrigan, Kristin Swain

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

New Originalism: Arizona's Founding Progressives On Extreme Punishment, John Mills, Aliya Sternstein

Faculty Scholarship

Originalism, together with textualism, has been of growing interest to legal scholars and jurists alike. Discerning and putting forth the views of “the founders” has become part and parcel of effective advocacy, particularly regarding constitutional questions. Arizona is no exception, with its courts explicitly giving originalism primacy over all other interpretive doctrines for discerning the meaning of an ambiguous provision of its Constitution.

Yet, the Arizona state courts have not engaged with the views of the state’s founders on key issues concerning the purposes of punishment, as demonstrated by the founders’ words and deeds. Arizona was founded in 1912 as …

A Call For An Intersectional Feminist Restorative Justice Approach To Addressing The Criminalization Of Black Girls, Thalia Gonzalez, Donna Coker

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Brains Without Money: Poverty As Disabling, Emily R. Murphy

Faculty Scholarship

e United States has long treated poverty and disability as separate legal and social categories, a division grounded in widespread assumptions about the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. In the case of disability, individuals generally are not thought to be morally responsible for their disadvantage, whereas in the case of poverty, individuals are assumed to be at fault for their disadvantage and are therefore less deserving of aid. This Article argues that recent advances in brain and behavioral science undermine the factual basis for those assumptions. Poverty inhibits brain development during childhood and, later in life, adversely affects cognitive capacities that …

Egg-Freezing, Uterine Transplants, And In Vitro Gametogenesis: Disruptive Or Normalizing Reproductive Technologies?, Radhika Rao

Faculty Scholarship

In the last year, headlines have heralded the introduction of several radical new technologies that promise to revolutionize procreation and transform our understanding of reproduction. In March 2021, for example, scientists revealed that mouse embryos had been grown in" artificial wombs" for 11 days, roughly half the animal's natural gestation period. According to Jacob Hanna, the biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel who led the research team: "This sets the stage for other species. I hope that it will allow scientists to grow human embryos until week five." At the same time, two groups of researchers reported …

Law In The Service Of Misinformation: How Anti-Vaccine Groups Use The Law To Help Spin A False Narrative, Dorit R. Reiss, Viridiana Ordonez

Faculty Scholarship

Social movements use legal tools to create narratives. Those narratives support social agendas which certain movements leverage to mislead their followers and potential followers. In this Article, we examine one influential anti-vaccine organization, the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), that uses its far-reaching platform to create false narratives around legal action. Again and again, this anti-vaccine group misrepresented both the legal and the factual meanings of court decisions, settlements, and other legal actions to create a narrative to galvanize its followers and influence newcomers. ICAN filed lawsuits that make anti-vaccine arguments—even when the legal framework did not fit doing so—and …

Drafting Agricultural Legislation, Jessica Vapnek

Faculty Scholarship

"Agricultural legislation” is an umbrella term that covers a broad range of topics, including food, veterinary matters, plant protection, seeds, forestry, fisheries, water, and land. Agricultural legislation also intersects with other discrete subject areas, including environment, health, and trade. Because of these interconnections the borderlines – where agriculture begins and these related topics end – are debatable. How different countries view agriculture varies significantly. In the developed world, agriculture is mostly a commercial enterprise, and “agricultural law” is considered largely to apply to the business of agriculture, including agricultural finance, supply chains, marketing, insurance (crop, drought, pest), real estate, intellectual …

Regulating Democratized Investing, Abraham Cable

Faculty Scholarship

Robinhood and its imitators activated millions of new investors. Perhaps we should applaud them for finally resurrecting the retail investor after a decades-long decline. There are, however, reasons for concern. Robinhood racked up record fines in the run-up to its IPO. Its users are young, inexperienced, and prone to speculating in risky investments. Given these concerns, this Article considers how to protect this new class of “ultra-retail investors” while also leaving regulatory breathing room for these new market participants. It concludes that many current regulatory approaches risk being ineffectual or stamping out ultra-retail investing altogether by targeting product features that …

The New Normal: Regulatory Dysfunction As Policymaking, Ming Hsu Chen, Daimeon Shanks

Faculty Scholarship

Scholars often presume that administrative dysfunction is a deviation from the norm of regularity in administrative law. This presumption is reinforced by courts who defer to agencies on the basis of a legal fiction of idealized regularity. In reality, irregularities are common in policymaking and they make agencies vulnerable to dysfunction. Irregularities are not bugs, but features of the administrative state. Sometimes, a national emergency makes political influence unavoidable and urges departures from usual regulatory processes. At other times, however, the framing of a problem as a national emergency is a pretextual justification to pursue a pre- determined political goal …

Colorblind Nationalism And The Limits Of Liberalism, Ming Hsu Chen

Faculty Scholarship

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 …

Advertising Medicine: Selling The Cure, Robin Feldman

Faculty Scholarship

Although most countries forbid advertising medicine to patients, “direct-to- consumer advertising” has flourished in the United States over the past century. Research shows that the practice prompts inappropriate prescriptions and disadvantages generic competitors, leading to adverse drug reactions and increased prescription drug spending. Nevertheless, a comprehensive regulatory system for direct-to-consumer advertising continues to escape the grasp of policymakers. Regulatory authority has bounced between the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), where primary jurisdiction now resides. Since the FDA assumed responsibility, the agency’s only major regulatory initiative has been to minimize disclosure requirements for advertisements. Enforcement …

Critical Race Feminism, Health, And Restorative Practices In Schools: Centering The Experiences Of Black And Latina Girls, Thalia Gonzalez, Rebecca Epstein

Faculty Scholarship

Restorative practices (RP) in K-12 schools in the United States have grown exponentially since the early 1990s. Developing against a backdrop of systemic racism, RP has become embedded in educa- tion practice and policy to counteract the harmful and persistent patterns of disparities in school discipline experienced by students of color. Within this legal, social, and political context, the em- pirical evidence that has been gathered on school-based restora- tive justice has framed and named RP as a behavioral interven- tion aimed at reducing discipline incidents—that is, an “alternative” to punitive and exclusionary practices. While this view of RP is …

Trade Secrets In Biologic Medicine: The Boundary With Patents, Robin Feldman

Faculty Scholarship

Can something be both open and secret? That is the conundrum facing society as trade secret rights chafe against patent rights in cutting-edge, biologic medicine. The conflict is unsurprising. Trade secret has emerged as a relatively late bloomer among the family of intellectual property rights and only recently has begun to establish the boundaries of its own space, a process in which it will inevitably knock against other intellectual property doctrines already occupying their own domains. Nor is it surprising that the clash would arise in a fast-moving area of medical science. From insulin products, to cancer treatments, to mRNA …

Secrecy Creep, Christina Koningisor

Faculty Scholarship

Legal scholars have long been fascinated by the topic of government secrecy. Yet they have largely focused their attention on federal secrecy, rarely exploring secrecy in other contexts. This Article addresses this gap. It turns its attention to state and local government secrets, applying the lens of federal secrecy to the subfederal regime. In doing so, it identifies a troubling new development in state and local law: the migration of powerful federal secrecy protections, initially developed to shield the national security state, into the state and local context. I refer to this process as “secrecy creep.” By illuminating the architecture …

Punitive Surveillance, Kate Weisburd

Faculty Scholarship

Budget constraints, bipartisan desire to address mass incarceration, and the COVID-19 crisis in prisons have triggered state and federal officials to seek alternatives to incarceration. As a result, invasive electronic surveillance—such as GPS-equipped ankle monitors, smartphone tracking, and suspicionless searches of electronic devices—is often touted as a humane substitute for incarceration. This type of monitoring, which I term “punitive surveillance,” allows government officials, law enforcement, and for-profit companies to track, record, search, and analyze the location, biometric data, and other meta-data of thousands of people on probation and parole. With virtually no legal oversight or restraint, punitive surveillance deprives people …

Structural Biases In Structural Constitutional Law, Jonathan S. Gould, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

Structural constitutional law regulates the workings of government and supplies the rules of the political game. Whether by design or by accident, these rules sometimes tilt the playing field for or against certain political factions – not just episodically, based on who holds power at a given moment, but systematically over time – in terms of electoral outcomes or policy objectives. In these instances, structural constitutional law is itself structurally biased.

This Article identifies and begins to develop the concept of such structural biases, with a focus on biases affecting the major political parties. Recent years have witnessed a revival …

Dual Federalism, Constitutional Openings, And The Convention On The Rights Of Persons With Disabilities, Benjamin Barsky

Faculty Scholarship

The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (“CRPD”) represents a historic achievement for the global disability rights movement. Yet, when the U.S. Senate refused to ratify it on December 4, 2012, its influence on American law and policy seemed doomed. The Founders, after all, had conceived of a constitutional vision where the federal government acts as the ultimate arbiter of questions of international policy. Under this vision of “dual federalism”—which dominated how the legal profession understood U.S. involvement in foreign affairs for over a century—only the federal political branches have the power to make and implement international laws …