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Vaccines and IP Preparedness in the Coronavirus Outbreak
Get PDFThe COVID-19 pandemic has shed renewed light on the importance of research and development (R&D) on biopharmaceutical products needed to prevent or lessen the burden posed by outbreaks of infectious diseases. Among these, the need for new vaccines has become of paramount importance. While a race to develop different types of vaccines unfolds at unusual speed, there are still significant shortcomings in the ecosystem that leads to the production and dissemination of vaccines targeting infectious diseases like COVID-19
#Metoo Meets the Emergency Room: Providing and Paying for Care After a Sexual Assault
Get PDFSexual assault continues to be a major public health problem in the United States. Compounding the problem, survivors of sexual assault all too often face challenges of obtaining and paying for sexual assault forensic exams (SAFEs), commonly referred to as a “rape kit,” and related medical services. Sexual assault survivors who do seek medical care in the emergency department (ED) are often turned away for several reasons, such as EDs determining that sexual assault is not an emergency medical condition, failing to carry SAFEs, or refusing to treat survivors who lack proof of insurance. Denial of care can further traumatize survivors, deter medically necessary treatment, result in loss of forensic evidence, and cause non-physically apparent medical needs to be overlooked. Federal laws, such as the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), offer only limited remedies to compel and cover care for survivors of sexual assault. Consequently, federal and state legislative, regulatory, and enforcement action is needed to ensure that sexual assault survivors receive appropriate care and that such care is covered.
This article provides overviews of sexual assault in the United States and the appropriate follow-up health care services that survivors need. It also identifies the barriers to accessing and affording appropriate health care services following a sexual assault and applicable laws governing provision and payment for such services. It analyzes potential remedies for survivors who are denied access to SAFEs and related services, and it provides recommended actions at both the state and federal levels that will better ensure access to and coverage of SAFEs and related services
International Institutions and Ebola Response: Learning from the 2017 Outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo
Get PDF“Stealing Conflicts” No More?: The Gaps and Anti-Restorative Elements in States’ Restorative-Justice Laws
Get PDFThis Article first profiles key findings emanating from a statutory analysis of the close to two hundred criminal-justice-related, as well as juvenile-justice-related, statutory provisions in the United States that pertain to restorative justice and practices (RJ/RP). This section of the Article unveils significant gaps and other substantial problems in states’ restorative-justice laws, including ways in which some of them conflict with core restorative tenets. The Article then proffers seven recommended statutory provisions for states’ consideration when enacting or amending their own RJ/RP laws. These recommended provisions, combined with fidelity in their implementation, would help remedy or avert the gaps and anti-restorative elements this study found in existing restorative-justice laws in the United States
Reframing Bitcoin and Tax Compliance
Get PDFThis Article argues that, contrary to the common belief that Bitcoin enables tax evasion, the Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) can increasingly police transactions in Bitcoin. First, commercial and technical intermediaries have emerged as part of Bitcoin’s ecosystem. This diverse set of intermediaries can facilitate tax enforcement, as the litigation over the IRS’s summons on Coinbase—the largest domestic digital asset exchange—and subsequent IRS efforts show. These intermediaries could report transactions to the IRS or even, one day, withhold and remit tax payments. Second, the publicly visible, trustworthy nature of Bitcoin’s blockchain—its unique role as a shared truth—allows tax authorities to observe transaction flows. This renders Bitcoin unusually regulable for tax purposes, as recent efforts by the IRS to rely on Bitcoin’s blockchain to police tax evasion demonstrate. The Article offers a proposal by which the IRS might make better use of Bitcoin’s blockchain: the IRS can tailor an existing program to reward technically savvy whistleblowers who scour Bitcoin’s blockchain and determine identities that correspond to public Bitcoin addresses at issue
Building Worker Collective Action Through Technology
Get PDFThe COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the inequality between workers and their employers, and decreased worker power over their terms and conditions of employment. At the same time, the workers are more dispersed than ever, with more employers disestablishing the traditional office in favor of a hybrid model that further atomizes workers and makes collective action harder. At the same time, the ability for workers to organize themselves on social media and on company e-mail systems has been limited by recent decisions of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), and are always subject to possible employer discovery and retaliation. New technologies are needed to build collective action and solidarity among workers but also to provide a conduit to government agencies to make complaints and provide anonymous information. This Article sets a template for development of mobile applications (“apps”) that employees can use to communicate with each other and the government when necessary. Private companies, government agencies and unions have all developed technology tools to meet their needs. The challenge for the development of the next generation of apps will be, inter alia: 1) to require the employer to distribute these apps to their employees without the employer exerting control over them; (2) to assure the employees that the apps provide a space for candid exchange of information free from surveillance and retaliation; (3) to provide unions the ability to access these “digital spaces” while the courts and the NLRB have made access to physical spaces increasingly difficult; and (4) to provide a store of data for government agencies to enforce workplace law statutes, while at the same time maintaining employee privacy for sensitive information. This Article proposes ways to address each of these challenges. In the end, building worker power through technology also depends on increasing unionization, and lessening economic and technological inequality as well
Data Battles, Platform Shutdowns, and Digital Rights in Surveillance: Labor Politics in the Online Sex Industry
Get PDFSex workers are often portrayed as groups with little authority over their jobs. But lately they are making much use of online spaces, both large scale public-facing platforms and their own smaller websites. Taking a deeper ethnographic look into their online activities, I recount a story of highly adept, technologically proficient, and expert digital navigation by sex workers online.
The analysis follows the trajectory of platforms in the online sex industry over the last two decades. First it charts the rise of platforms for matching, reviewing, and identity verification, many of which developed roughly around the 2000s, and their impact in reconfiguring the online labor of sex workers. Then it outlines events unfolding in the mid-2010s, when the state responded to this trend with legislation like SESTA-FOSTA, the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, and the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act.
Representing a departure from previous strategies regarding the sex industry, these state policies embark on a battle for control over data. They identify platforms as the main source of the problem and turn to solutions of simply taking them down. I will argue that this strategy fails to address the broader structural conditions which draw people into online sex work. It also fails to recognize the ways that workers and other groups use platforms, and the kinds of surveillance they practice through them
Exodus from the Land of Confusion: Why Hughes v. United States Supports the Overruling of the Unworkable Marks Doctrine and a Change in Court Practice
Get PDFThe Marks doctrine was established by the Supreme Court as an earnest attempt to divine binding precedent from fractured decisions that failed to gain support from a majority of the Justices. While well-intentioned, the doctrine has proved to be, at best, difficult, and more often nearly impossible to correctly apply with any degree of certainty. Recently, in Hughes v. United States, the Court had the opportunity to further flesh out the doctrine and provide struggling courts and practitioners guidance when working with the rule’s abstruse mandates. Instead, the Court declined this opportunity. This comment will discuss the development of the doctrine, the challenges that courts have had when working with it, and the doctrine’s ultimate illogicality and unworkability. The Court’s failure in Hughes to further develop the doctrine signifies the beginning of the end. The Marks doctrine more properly belongs in a museum than in contemporary American jurisprudence, and this comment will conclude that the doctrine, along with non-majority opinions in general, should be rendered obsolete and replaced by one, and only one, majority opinion that provides the binding precedent for future courts to follow