Law Commons^™

Pandemic Hope For Chapter 11 Financing, David A. Skeel Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

One of the biggest surprises of the recent pandemic from a bankruptcy perspective has been the ready availability of financing. A variety of factors—such as an estimated $2.5 trillion in available funding at the outset of the crisis and the buoyant stock market—may have contributed. In this Essay, I focus on a less widely appreciated factor, a striking shift in the capital structure of many corporate debtors. Rather than borrowing from one group of lenders, debtors now often borrow from multiple groups of diverse lenders. Although the new capital structure complexity has downsides, it also could counteract a longstanding problem …

Nowhere To Run To, Nowhere To Hide, Praveen Kosuri, Lynnise Pantin

All Faculty Scholarship

As the COVID-19 global pandemic ravaged the United States, exacerbating the country’s existing racial disparities, Black and brown small business owners navigated unprecedented obstacles to stay afloat. Adding even more hardship and challenges, the United States also engaged in a nationwide racial reckoning in the wake of the murder of George Floyd resulting in wide-scale protests in the same neighborhoods that initially saw a disproportionate impact of COVID-19 and harming many of the same Black and brown business owners. These business owners had to operate in an environment in which they experienced recurring trauma, mental anguish and uncertainty, along with …

2021 Labor Day Facts - Travel, Money & More: Ask The Experts, John S. Kiernan, Erin J. Hendrickson

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

The Intersectional Race And Gender Effects Of The Pandemic In Legal Academia, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Faculty Scholarship

Just as the COVID-19 pandemic helped to expose the inequities that already existed between students at every level of education based on race and socioeconomic class status, it has exposed existing inequities among faculty based on gender and the intersection of gender and race. The legal academy has been no exception to this reality. The widespread loss of childcare and the closing of both public and private primary and secondary schools have disproportionately harmed women law faculty, who are more likely than their male peers to work a “second shift” in terms of childcare and household responsibilities. Similarly, women law …

Essential Jobs, Remote Work And Digital Surveillance: Addressing The Covid-19 Pandemic Panopticon, Antonio Aloisi, Valerio De Stefano

Articles & Book Chapters

COVID-19-induced digital surveillance has ballooned in an unprecedented fashion, causing a reconfiguration of power relationships in professional settings. This article critically concentrates on the interplay between technology-enabled intrusive monitoring and the managerial prerogatives augmentation in physical and digital workplaces. It portrays excessive control as the common denominator for “essential” and “remotable” activities, besides discussing the various drawbacks of the two categories of workers during the pandemic. It also assesses the adequacy of the current EU legal framework in addressing the expansion of data-driven management. Social dialogue, empowerment and digital literacy are identified as effective solutions to promote organisational flexibility, well-being …

Analysis Of Administrative Agency Adjudicatory Hearing Use Of Remote Appearances And Virtual Hearings, Fredric I. Lederer, Center For Legal & Court Technology

Faculty Publications

With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, federal and state courts and federal adjudicatory agencies suspended most trials and hearings. Faced with the requirement to fulfill their basic mission, many resumed partial operations using computer-based video conferencing,especially for preliminary legal and procedural matters. As time passed, the use of that videoconferencing extended to bench trials in courts and to adjudicatory hearings and proceedings such as settlement meetings, mediations, arbitrations, and status conferences in federal agencies. As of this writing, there have also been a small number of remote or virtual jury trials in state and federal courts.

The Administrative Conference …

The Brief (Edition #5, February 2021), William & Mary Law School

The Brief

No abstract provided.

From Stigma To Dignity? Transforming Workfare With Universal Basic Income And A Federal Job Guarantee, Lynn D. Lu

Publications and Research

As the COVID-19 pandemic takes a catastrophic toll on lives and livelihoods across the United States, the harshest impact of the unpredictable virus has disproportionately fallen with foreseeable accuracy on Black, immigrant, poor, and elderly people, who are most likely to live and work in close contact with others and to have less access to health care or emergency savings. The speed and severity of the viral contagion has rendered devastatingly, undeniably visible the vast, racial gap between those with reliable health care, child care, housing, nutrition, household wealth, and income and those without, but that gap was already widening …

The Evolving Technology-Augmented Courtroom Before, During, And After The Pandemic, Fredric I. Lederer

Faculty Publications

Even before the COVID-19 Pandemic, technology was changing the nature of America’s courtrooms. Access to case management and e-filing data and documents coupled with electronic display of information and evidence at trial, remote appearances, electronic court records, and assistive technology for those with disabilities defined the technology-augmented trial courtroom. With the advent of the Pandemic and the need for social distancing, numerous courts moved to remote appearances, virtual hearings, and even virtual trials. This Article reviews the nature of technology-augmented courtrooms and discusses virtual hearings and trials at length, reviewing legality, technology, human factors, and public acceptance, and concludes that …

The Brief (Edition #4, January 2021), William & Mary Law School

The Brief

No abstract provided.

Nowhere To Run To, Nowhere To Hide, Praveen Kosuri, Lynnise E. Pantin

Faculty Scholarship

As the COVID-19 global pandemic ravaged the United States, exacerbating the country’s existing racial disparities, Black and brown small business owners navigated unprecedented obstacles to stay afloat. Adding even more hardship and challenges, the United States also engaged in a nationwide racial reckoning in the wake of the murder of George Floyd resulting in wide-scale protests in the same neighborhoods that initially saw a disproportionate impact of COVID-19 and harming many of the same Black and brown business owners. These business owners had to operate in an environment in which they experienced recurring trauma, mental anguish and uncertainty, along with …

All Rise: Suiting Up When Showing Up For The Practice Of Law In The Covid-19 Virtual Legal Environment, Marissa Moran

Publications and Research

The age-old advice: “No matter how you feel, get up, dress up, and show up for work and life!” may be worth remembering as more legal professionals participate in virtual environments due to the COVID-19 mandated court closures.

Virtual court hearings, mediations, and meetings are taking place. Attorneys and legal educators have adapted to changes in how we meet clients and students by utilizing Blackboard Collaborative, Zoom, Cisco WebEx, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet/Hangouts, and Skype. Do such changes in our ways of meeting and communicating-within the virtual environment-bring with them a corresponding change in expectations of what is appropriate attire …

What Regulators Can Learn From Global Health Governance, Cary Coglianese

All Faculty Scholarship

The Great Pandemic of 2020 shows how much public health around the world depends on effective global and domestic governance. Yet for too long, global health governance and domestic regulatory governance have remained largely separate fields of scholarship and practice. In her book, Global Health Justice and Governance, Jennifer Prah Ruger offers scholars and practitioners of regulatory governance an excellent opportunity to see how domestic regulation shares many of the same problems, strategies, and challenges as global health governance. These commonalities reinforce how much national and subnational regulators can learn from global health governance. Drawing on insights from Prah …

Pandemic Surveillance Discrimination, Christian Sundquist

Articles

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the abiding tension between surveillance and privacy. Public health epidemiology has long utilized a variety of surveillance methods—such as contact tracing, quarantines, and mandatory reporting laws—to control the spread of disease during past epidemics and pandemics. Officials have typically justified the resulting intrusions on privacy as necessary for the greater public good by helping to stave off larger health crisis. The nature and scope of public health surveillance in the battle against COVID-19, however, has significantly changed with the advent of new technologies. Digital surveillance tools, often embedded in wearable technology, have greatly increased …

Extending Postpartum Medicaid: State And Federal Policy Options During And After Covid-19, Jamie R. Daw, Emily Eckert, Heidi Allen, Kristen Underhill

Faculty Scholarship

The United States is facing a maternal health crisis with rising rates of maternal mortality and morbidity and stark disparities in maternal outcomes by race and socioeconomic status. Among the efforts to address this issue, one policy proposal is gaining particular traction: extending the period of Medicaid eligibility for pregnant women beyond 60 days after childbirth. The authors examine the legislative and regulatory pathways most readily available for extending postpartum Medicaid, including their relative political, economic, and public health trade-offs. They also review the state and federal policy activity to date and discuss the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on …

Vaccination Equity By Design, Olatunde C.A. Johnson, Kristen Underhill

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay examines how states’ initial COVID-19 vaccine-distribution strategies tended to disadvantage populations of color, including Black, Latinx, and Native American communities. These dynamics resonate with “inverse equity” effects of other public-health innovations. We argue for a federal regulatory framework to reduce inequity-forcing effects during initial vaccine rollout.