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How International Organizations Regulate Lobbyist Access
Full text linkThis chapter explores how international organizations (IOs) regulate lobbyist access through participation frameworks rather than traditional lobbying laws. While no unified international lobbying regime exists, IOs use rules on NGO \u27consultation\u27 and \u27engagement\u27 to structure access. These rules, rooted in historical practices like the UN\u27s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) accreditation system, prioritize representativeness and legitimacy over transparency and accountability. As lobbying increasingly targets international forums, concerns about undue influence (the \u27lobbying critique\u27) and insufficient stakeholder inclusion (the \u27access critique\u27) have driven divergent reforms: some IOs, like the World Health Organization, have adopted stricter controls; others, such as the GAVI Alliance and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, offer more direct stakeholder participation. These evolving models raise questions about legitimacy, transparency, and the future of global governance. The chapter argues for deeper theorization of lobbying\u27s role in IOs and recommends developing access regimes that balance openness with safeguards, reduce fragmentation, and address informal influence in hybrid public-private governance structures
Advanced Introduction to Family Law in the US
No full textThis Elgar Advanced Introduction provides key insights into family law in the US. In the midst of consequential changes wrought by the US Supreme Court, this book traces the evolution of the field from its origins in the law of domestic relations to the more modern regime of family law.Key features include:● Integrates state law, federal law, legal scholarship, and literature from other disciplines.● Identifies the regulation of sex and the policy of keeping dependency private as family law\u27\u27s principal enduring features.● Surveys different topics in family law including: marriage, nonmarriage, and dissolution; pregnancy; parentage; and children.● Reviews the impact of the US Supreme Court\u27\u27s Dobbs decision on all of family law in the US and looks ahead to the future of family law.Advanced Introduction to Family Law in the US is a valuable resource for teaching and learning family law, and also provides a sophisticated entry point for students and academics in gender studies and legal studies
Apportioned Direct Taxes
Full text linkThe Constitution requires that Congress apportion any “direct” tax among the states by population. This once-dormant provision is now the most important constitutional limitation on Congress’s taxing power. Last year, in Moore v. United States, the Supreme Court seriously considered, for the first time in decades, whether to invalidate an Act of Congress as an unapportioned direct tax. While the law survived, Moore has opened a new era in which scholars and policymakers must again take apportionment seriously. Yet the apportionment requirement remains poorly understood.
This Article provides a new perspective on apportionment by examining how Congress and Treasury sought to design and implement apportioned direct taxes. Today, apportionment is regarded as a complete nonstarter. But Congress enacted apportioned direct taxes at three distinct junctures: in 1798, during the War of 1812, and once more in 1861. We study the design and consequences of these taxes—and, in so doing, uncover new details. Apportioned direct taxes never raised the funds that Congress directed and were never successfully apportioned as the Constitution seemingly requires.
These findings call for reevaluating tax apportionment. Existing accounts of apportionment’s disappearance focus on the conflict between apportionment and modern tax progressivity, but we identify a deeper tension in the Constitution’s requirement: between the need to specify an “apportioned” revenue target and a “direct” tax base. Congress and Treasury were more successful in apportioning taxes only when they relaxed the definition of the direct base. Indeed, the political branches never embraced a consistent definition of the direct tax base or a rigid understanding of what apportionment required—findings with ongoing relevance for today’s new debate over the scope of the taxing power
Employment Stability and Security of Low-Wage Workers in the United States
No full textOne quarter of workers in the United States make $35,000 or less, and nearly half of these are between 35 and 64 years old. Forty percent are caring for children in the home. As temporary and gig working arrangements become increasingly common, this brief explores the stability of work and income for low-wage workers. The analyses draw upon data from the Workforce Economic Inclusion and Mobility survey administered to a nationally representative sample of U.S. workers earning less than 250% of the federal poverty line. The findings from this work have direct implications for employment practices and labor policies
Justifying the Fourth Amendment
No full textWhy does the Fourth Amendment belong in the Constitution? This question is not whether society should impose some legal restraints on government searches and seizures. Rather, why should such protections reside in our national charter, superior to other forms of law and insulated from change via ordinary majoritarian political processes? Despite major disputes about the Fourth Amendment’s content, Fourth Amendment theorists rarely ask this question. Almost all agree that the Fourth Amendment’s constitutional protections are critically important—even if no one can agree exactly what those protections are.
This Article seeks a justification for the Fourth Amendment—the reason why search-and-seizure protections deserve to be enshrined in supreme and entrenched constitutional law. While this question might seem beside the point, identifying a justification for the Fourth Amendment should be seen as a critical step in choosing a theory of the Fourth Amendment’s meaning. Yet whether understood as freezing in place specific substantive rules, a broader value like privacy, or an institutional allocation of power, the reason to constitutionalize such a guarantee is surprisingly elusive.
After canvassing all potential justifications for the Fourth Amendment as constitutional law, this Article finds that many are unappealing or unpersuasive; those that survive rest on uneasy premises. That conclusion poses a challenge to Fourth Amendment theorists, who must explain why their reading merits constitutional status. More generally, searching for the Fourth Amendment’s justification reveals how criminal procedure scholars can learn from constitutional theory. That investigation also deepens our understanding of constitutional interpretation and the very notion of constitutionalism itself
Musk’s Inexcusable Conflicts
No full textBig picture: It is, of course, absurd to rely on Elon Musk to recognize and respond to his own conflicts of interest. As far as I can gauge, Musk does not even recognize that he is not an elected official. Even if he had been, the only place in the federal government that relies on officials to police their own conflicts is the Supreme Court…and, well, we know how that has turned out
Tortious Interference Revisited
Full text linkTortious interference with contract has bedeviled legal commentators for over a century. It can provide relief in some situations where straightforward contract breach cannot reach. But these claims have also been derided for threatening competition, at-will employment, free speech, and important guardrails on other private law claims. The doctrine is also difficult to square with theories of efficient contract breach and the long-held view that contracts on their own are not property interests.Perhaps because of its intellectual awkwardness, tortious interference claims were relatively rare until the twenty-first century. In the last twenty years, the doctrine has exploded in popularity, bringing to the fore the its old risks and unsettled questions. It is now appearing in disputes over athletic coaches, non-compete clauses, debt, and even Title IX.This article revisits tortious interference with contract at this pivotal moment in the doctrine’s history, considering its use both descriptively and normatively. In doing so, this article makes three contributions. First, it provides a nuanced and layered account of tortious interference doctrine as it exists today. Relying on an original empirical analysis, it finds that some of the most modern uses of the doctrine raise new theoretical, practical, and moral questions. Second, it introduces a new third-party theory of interference, which situates tortious interference doctrine in a growing literature on the roles of third parties in contract. While prior literature on tortious interference has focused on third-party beneficiaries in contract, this article argues that tortious interference doctrine reveals third-party obligations in contracts. This section makes the case that malice is the most coherent standard for tortious interference and best minimizes the doctrine’s risks. Finally, this article updates our understanding of the doctrine’s theoretical and practical implications in light of new and pervasive claims
Constraining Biases in the Measurements of Aerosol-Radiation Interactions: A First Principles Approach
Full text linkAerosol-radiation interactions remain a critical yet uncertain component of Earth’s climate system. Carbonaceous aerosols, particularly black carbon (BC) and brown carbon (BrC), are significant contributors to radiative forcing due to their strong light-absorbing characteristics. However, systematic measurement biases and incomplete representations of aerosol properties across multiple scales can hinder our understanding of their interaction with solar radiation and climatic impacts. This dissertation addresses these gaps through a multipronged investigation that integrates measurement corrections, atomic-scale simulations, particle-scale optical modeling, and large-scale radiative forcing evaluations. Firstly, filter-based instruments commonly used for aerosol light absorption measurements, such as the Particle Soot Absorption Photometer, suffer from artifacts which leads to overestimation of light absorption. To address these biases, the first major component of this dissertation systematically evaluates both analytical (e.g., Virkkula and Bond–Ogren corrections) and machine learning-based approaches (Random Forest Regression) at the Southern Great Plains site and Tracking Aerosol Convection Interactions Experiment campaign. The results show that machine learning based corrections can reduce filter-based measurement errors by as much as 50%, highlighting the importance of site-specific, nonlinear correction frameworks. These data-driven corrections were also used to determine the impact of the key input parameters on biases in the Particle Soot Absorption Photometer measurements, such as absorption by dark-BrC particles. Beyond aerosol light absorption measurement corrections, a deeper understanding of the black-brown continuum in carbonaceous aerosols requires exploring the atomic-scale processes that drive their optical diversity. Building on this need, the second major component of this dissertation uses density functional theory calculations to reveal how hydrogen-tocarbon (H/C) ratios and carbon hybridization states (sp2 vs. sp3) modulate light absorption. By correlating reduced sp2 hybridization with lower imaginary refractive indices, this study elucidates the continuum from strongly absorbing “black” carbon to more wavelengthdependent absorption of “brown” carbon. Subsequently, this dissertation advances to the next scale through particle-scale modeling of light absorption and scattering by BrC aggregates. The third major component of this dissertation employs polydisperse diffusion-limited cluster aggregation and the discrete dipole approximation to quantify how BrC subclasses (dark and weakly absorbing) and their aggregation morphologies (monomer numbers and sizes) alter absorption and scattering. The findings underscore that both absorption and scattering are enhanced due to near-field interactions among aggregated monomers, underscoring the necessity of incorporating realistic non-spherical aerosol morphologies into climate models. Finally, the fourth major component of this dissertation evaluates the broader radiative impacts of particle-scale diversity using BC injected into pyrocumulonimbus plumes during extreme wildfire events. Particle-resolved in situ measurements from the FIREX-AQ campaign reveal that simplifying BC morphology and mixing state can lead to a substantial underestimation of absorption and direct radiative forcing in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere region. Refined particle-resolved BC morphology model that capture the heterogeneity of BC coatings predict up to a 17% enhancement in amount of solar energy absorbed by pyrocumulonimbus BC aerosol layer. In sum, this dissertation bridges fundamental and applied aerosol research by: • Demonstrating advanced correction techniques for filter-based absorption biases. • Elucidating the atomic-scale structure-property relationships shaping the black-brown carbon continuum. • Quantifying aggregation-driven enhancements in BrC’s optical properties. • Assessing the implications of particle-scale aerosol heterogeneity on radiative forcing. Together, these contributions offer a robust “first principles” framework for improving the accuracy of aerosol light absorption measurements, refining our atomic- and particle-scale understanding of carbonaceous aerosols, and reducing uncertainties in aerosol-radiation interactions within climate models. This dissertation lays the groundwork for future efforts to more accurately represent aerosols in climate models
Security Protection for Real-Time Cyber-Physical Systems
Full text linkReal-time cyber physical systems play increasingly important roles in the real world, operating in environments that are sensitive to timing and encompassing a wide range, from low-end embedded devices such as microcontrollers to high-end platforms such as drones and autonomous vehicles. For computational efficiency, these systems are predominantly written in memory-unsafe languages like C/C++, which can introduce numerous memory safety vulnerabilities and lead to several security issues. Since these systems are often used in safety-critical applications, it is essential to ensure security in addition to timeliness. However, existing security protection mechanisms are primarily designed for general-purpose computing systems, and can introduce prohibitive runtime overhead on protected systems, including real-time systems. This high runtime overhead can hinder the direct application of these approaches in real-time contexts. Real-time systems, by contrast, are built on a different computational model to meet specific timing requirements, which presents new opportunities to incorporate security mechanisms with minimal overhead. This dissertation proposes novel security protection mechanisms specifically tailored for real-time systems, aimed at reducing the impact of security overhead on real-time performance. Expanding on three representative security protection mechanisms, including data flow integrity, control flow integrity, and pointer integrity, this work integrates real-time adaptations as follows: First, it proposes performing data-flow integrity checks during spare time within each execution iteration of real-time tasks, achieving strong security protection with minimal worst-case execution time overhead. Second, it extends control-flow integrity on embedded systems by conducting security checks asynchronously, leveraging scheduling windows to reduce real-time impact. Third, it utilizes available time within the overall system schedule to perform pointer integrity checks, enhancing system-wide security without impacting real-time schedulability. In doing so, this dissertation paves the way for optimizing and balancing the trade-off between security protection and real-time performance
Venturing Into Health
Full text linkIn recent years, the landscape of venture capital (VC) investment in healthcare technologies has been altered by the introduction of new types of VC firms: those that have emerged from hospital systems and health insurers. However, the legal literature has not yet analyzed these new VC firms, the role they may play in healthcare innovation, and how innovation law and policy ought to consider their involvement. Hospital system and health insurer VC firms operate very differently than do traditional VC firms, even those that have historically developed healthcare specializations. Instead of simply investing capital into start-up firms, hospital system and health insurer VC firms may also offer access to their networks of healthcare providers and to patient data, resources which may not be accessible to start-ups who partner only with traditional VC firms. When investing, hospital system and health insurer VC firms also act both as user innovators, hoping to adopt the technologies they invest in for themselves (to deliver care at a lower cost or to increase revenues), and as traditional investors, hoping to sell the technology to other hospital systems or insurers. Due to these dynamics, hospital system and health insurer VC firms do not fit easily with traditional healthcare innovation paradigms. As a result, they may be able to serve a unique innovation-encouraging role within the broader healthcare system, particularly with their specialized knowledge about healthcare delivery and services. They may also play a larger role in developing novel healthcare technologies, including those involving artificial intelligence. But they also may engage in innovation-stifling activity, either by investing in technologies which have insufficient evidence of safety and efficacy or by limiting the dissemination of innovative technologies. Legal and policy interventions may help encourage these innovative activities while simultaneously redressing potential patient harms