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From a Distance: Providing Online Academic Support and Bar Exam Preparation to Law Students and Alumni During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Get PDFAt its core, an academic support program’s mission is to help students improve their academic performance. But academic support programs also serve a broader purpose. They serve as a bridge between students, faculty, and staff, supporting faculty in their curriculum and course development and nurturing the connections between members of the law school community. They often develop and improve relations with alumni through bar exam preparation efforts. And, sometimes, they are even involved in the recruiting of new students. Through all of these interactions with students, faculty, staff, and alumni, academic support programs foster a sense of community within the law school. This Article introduces the reader to the field of law school academic support and explains the academic support program at SLU Law, both pre- and post-COVID-19. It then focuses on three areas that were the most critical to shifting the SLU Law academic support program online in the wake of the pandemic: (1) building a community with and for our students, (2) translating our physical space into an online presence, and (3) building online courses and adapting our programming while considering new questions of accessibility
New York’s Proposed Mark-to-Market Tax Decouples From Federal Tax
Get PDFA proposal decouples NY from federal tax computations to tax billionaires on unrealized appreciation. If enacted, the proposal generates basis discontinuities across borders but enhances state revenue and may prove attractive to many states. The article reviews how states seek to enhance revenues and considers issues of cross-border taxation and the fundamental right to travel
From Mandates to Governance: Restructuring the Employment Relationship
Get PDFEmployers are saddled with a dizzying array of responsibilities to their employees. Meant to advance a wide array of workplace policies, these demands have saddled employment with the burden of numerous social ends. However, that system has increasingly come under strain, as companies seek to shed employment relationships and workers lose important protections when terminated. In this Article, we propose that employers and employees should be given greater flexibility with a move from mandates to governance. Many of the employment protections required from employers stem from employees’ lack of organizational power. The imbalance is best addressed by providing workers with governance rights within the firm. In exchange for these governance rights, governments can lift or relax many employment mandates. In addition, certain responsibilities currently assigned to employers will be lifted and placed on the larger society—where they would be more appropriately carried. This rebalancing of the employment relationship will lead to a more economically secure and empowered populace while at the same time freeing businesses to better pursue their entrepreneurial endeavors
The Fourteenth Amendment and the Heart of the Constitution
Get PDFSince the nineteenth century, Americans have worked consistently to liberate their national government from the Constitutional constraints placed on it by Madison and his colleagues. This effort has transformed the United States from a federated republic in which local communities governed themselves into a modern managerial nation-state that is governed from the center. In this article, Dr. Guy Chet argues that the key to this transformation – of the Constitution and of the United States – was the Fourteenth Amendment.https://scholarship.law.slu.edu/lawjournalonline/1067/thumbnail.jp
Five Truths Learned After a Dozen Years of Asynchronous Online Teaching
Get PDFIn this article the author reflects on his more than twelve years of teaching asynchronous online law school courses and shares some of his beliefs about the value and limits of asynchronous teaching. The article addresses some surprising strengths of asynchronous online courses, including how black letter case law may be more effectively taught in the online format. Additionally, the article discusses how the asynchronous online format provides opportunities to excel for students with different abilities and personalities.
The article also addresses some potential limitations in the asynchronous online format, including the challenges inherent in student group work and collaboration. Additionally, the article addresses key structural decisions that a professor can make to strengthen the course and the student experience, including both philosophical and practical guidance
Warrants Needed for Biometric Analysis
Get PDFThis article argues that U.S. courts and legislatures should limit law enforcement application of biometric identification technologies within Constitutional bounds. Specifically, warrant requirements should be enforced for police to use facial recognition artificial intelligence and software. Such warrant requirement is practical for law enforcement and is already within the bounds of current Fourth Amendment cases
The Intellectual Property of COVID-19
Get PDFThe response to COVID-19 is indissolubly tied to intellectual property. In an increasingly globalized world in which infectious disease pathogens travel faster and wider than before, the development of vaccines, treatments and other forms of medical technology has become an integral part of public health preparedness and response frameworks. The development of these technologies, and to a certain extent the allocation and distribution of resulting outputs, is informed by intellectual property regimes. These regimes influence the commitment of R&D resources, shape scientific collaborations and, in some cases, may condition the widespread availability of emerging technologies. As seen throughout this chapter, COVID-19 has exposed the shortcomings of ingrained reliance on intellectual property as a channel for the production and dissemination of medical technologies needed to address the problems posed by pandemics and epidemics. At the same time, COVID-19 has brought new life to countervailing efforts to explore legal and policy mechanisms to potentially offset some of the problems posed by the pervasiveness of, and shortcomings associated with, intellectual property dynamics.
In tracing the dual ways in which intellectual property has affected preparedness for, and the response to, COVID-19, this chapter highlights three features of contemporary intellectual property regimes and examines their impact on innovation(s) needed to address public health crises. First, it explores the incentives function of patent law and policy, which places considerable emphasis on market-driven investment in R&D on medical technologies. In so doing, intellectual property becomes one of the driving forces of the commodification of goods—vaccines, drugs or ventilator parts, for example—which are best understood as public health goods.
Second, the chapter illustrates how intellectual property has reinforced an ethos of siloed R&D, as illustrated by the COVID-19 vaccine race, which at the time of writing includes hundreds of separate vaccine development projects. These siloes further extend into the allocative domain: with the development of medical technologies now largely steeped in proprietary frameworks, several countries have resumed the practice of reserving significant amounts of emerging technologies for their domestic populations, thus curtailing the possibility of equitable transnational approaches to a global public health crisis. This approach is commonly known in the field of vaccines as “vaccine nationalism.” Nationalism skews the distribution of medical technologies developed during a pandemic, reducing opportunities for transnational coordination and potentially limiting access to these technologies by populations in economically disadvantaged parts of the world.
The chapter ends nonetheless on a positive note, as COVID-19 has also made it abundantly clear that the legal infrastructure needed to address many of these problems is already in place. Early in the pandemic, several countries signaled that they would rely on intellectual property mechanisms to ensure broad and equitable access to medical technologies developed during (and possibly after) the pandemic, such as vaccines and treatments for COVID-19. These mechanisms embody different types of commitments to share intellectual property, data and knowledge. At the allocative level, a significant number of countries joined an ad hoc vaccine distribution facility (COVAX) coordinated by Geneva-based international organizations. These efforts, albeit nascent and, in many cases, likely transient nature, constitute meaningful steps towards a better innovation ecosystem for medical technologies needed to prevent and respond to future pandemic