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Will the \u27Legal Singularity\u27 Hollow Out Law\u27s Normative Core?
No full textThis Article undertakes a critical examination of the unintended consequences for the legal system if we arrive at the futurist dream of a legal singularity—the moment when predictive, mass-data technologies evolve to create a perfectly predictable, algorithmically expressed legal system bereft of all legal uncertainty. It argues that although the singularity would surely enhance the efficiency of the legal system in a narrow sense, it would also undermine the rule of law, a bedrock institution of any liberal legal order and a key source of the legal system’s legitimacy. It would do so by dissolving the normative content of the two core pillars of the rule of law: the predictability principle and the universality principle, each of which has traditionally been conceived as a bulwark against arbitrary government power.The futurists heralding the legal singularity privilege a weak-form predictability principle that emphasizes providing notice to legal subjects about the content of laws over a strong-form variant that also emphasizes the prevention of arbitrary governmental action. Hence, an inattentive and hurried embrace of predictive technologies in service of the (only weak-form) predictability principle will likely attenuate the rule of law’s connection to the deeper (strong-form) predictability principle. The legal singularity will also destabilize law’s universality principle, by reconceiving of legal subjects as aggregations of data points rather than as individual members of a polity. In so doing, it will undermine the universality principle’s premise that the differences among legal subjects are outweighed by what we—or, better still, “We the People” who are, as Blackstone put it, the “community in general”—have in common. A cautionary directive emerges from this analysis: that lawyers should avoid an uncritical embrace of predictive technologies in pursuit of a shrunken ideal of predictability that might ultimately require them to throw aside much of the normative ballast that has kept the liberal legal order stable and afloat
Towards a Just International Tax Order: Giving Content to Article 28 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Through the Global Tax System
No full textArticle 28 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) calls for ‘a social and international order’ in which human rights can be fully realized. In a globalized world where actions and policies have effects far beyond national borders, concerted action in an equitable international system is necessary for the true fulfillment of human rights. And yet the international order remains a system where power and politics consistently take precedence over states’ human rights obligations. The global tax system and efforts to reform it are a clear example of this failure to live up to the promise of UDHR Article 28. This chapter examines UDHR Article 28 and the global tax system as an illustration of how the international order fails to realize human rights and suggests what a global tax system that meets the requirements of UDHR Article 28 might look like. Finally, the chapter proposes some human rights-based advocacy methods that states and advocates could use to try to achieve such a system, including the use of the individual complaint procedures before Human Rights Treaty Bodies, the creation of a United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Taxation, and the examination of tax-related issues during the Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review process
Book Review, \u3ci\u3eThe Trillion Dollar Revolution: How The Affordable Care Act Transformed Politics, Law, and Health Care In America\u3c/i\u3e (Ezekiel J. Emanuel and Abbe R. Gluck, eds. (Public Affairs, 2020, pp. 464))
No full textThe Trillion Dollar Revolution assesses the ACA at 10 years, marking its achievements, trade-offs, shortfalls, impacts, and lessons for future reforms. The ACA was both monumental and paradoxical. It was the single biggest social welfare legislation enacted in 50 years and touched every aspect of our sprawling health care system. Yet the narrow political window for its passage meant that the ACA was incremental, building on, rather than fundamentally restructuring, our fragmented health care system. The ACA was imperfect because it inherited many flaws of the existing health care system. Nevertheless, the ACA achieved something quite revolutionary--it changed the minds of the American public, who have since embraced notions of health care access as a right and preexisting condition protections as a given
