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Enhancing the Validity and Fairness of Lawyer Licensing: Empirical Evidence Supporting Innovative Pathways
No full textA two-day written bar exam cannot test a prospective lawyer’s ability to counsel clients, investigate facts, research novel issues, negotiate with adversaries, and perform other tasks that are essential for competent lawyering. The conventional exam has also become a test of resources, favoring candidates who can afford to buy commercial prep courses and devote 8-10 weeks to full-time study. Cognizant of these flaws, several states have begun exploring alternative approaches to licensing. Oregon has already implemented a small program that allows some law graduates to demonstrate their competence by practicing under the supervision of a licensed attorney and compiling portfolios of work product from that supervised practice. Candidates submit those portfolios, which include materials related to client counseling and negotiation, to bar examiners for independent assessment. Oregon’s Supreme Court is considering a proposal to expand this program, and other states are exploring similar approaches.This article provides the first empirical evidence that supervised practice offers a valid, feasible, and fair context for evaluating prospective lawyers’ competence. Oregon’s current program is too small to assess empirically, but two related programs in California offer a rich dataset about the potential for assessing prospective lawyers’ competence through supervised practice. Our analyses, which draw upon qualitative and quantitative data from more than four thousand law graduates and licensed lawyers in California, demonstrate that: (1) Licensing programs rooted in supervised practice allow states to assess a broader range of lawyering skills and doctrinal knowledge than can be assessed on a two-day, written exam. (2) Candidates readily find supervisors, and both parties reap many benefits from the program. (3) Supervised practice is fully accessible to first-generation candidates, candidates of color, women, and candidates who live with disabilities. In fact, women of color, men of color, and white women were significantly more likely than white men to take advantage of California’s supervised practice options. (4) Supervised practice licensing paths can expand access to justice by increasing the number of lawyers who work for legal services providers and in rural parts of a state.Licensing paths rooted in supervise practice, in sum, are valid, feasible, and fair pathways that can protect the public better than a two-day written exam, make our profession more inclusive, and expand access to justice
Alexander S. Glover Jr., et al., Order on Plaintiffs\u27 Motion to Dismiss Counterclaim of Defendant Railroad Valley Mining Company, LLC
Full text linkFarmland and Forestland in an Era of Climate Change: Hurricane Michael and Opportunities to Advance Rural Resilience
No full textCatastrophic disasters fundamentally destabilize and reshape communities. They often cause loss of life and invariably inflict extensive property damage. Disabled individuals, the elderly, chronically ill persons, and families struggling to make ends meet are almost always left more vulnerable.1 Affected communities frequently experience population loss, a declining property tax base, and economic contraction.2 *1722 Over the last three decades, a string of major disasters has focused scholarly attention on their far-reaching impacts on large cities. Storms and earthquakes have reshaped urban landscapes and forced communities to reckon with their futures from San Francisco to Northridge, Houston to New Orleans, and Miami to the New York metro area.3 These catastrophes will be studied for years to come. As compelling and iconic as the stories of urban wreckage and recovery have become, they have limitations when applied to the nation\u27s smaller-sized communities. Urban disaster narratives elide a range of vulnerabilities that expose small cities and towns--and the agricultural industry those communities often support--to the far-reaching costs and harms of natural disasters. Further, commentators and scholars who have focused broadly on the problems facing smaller cities and rural areas have sometimes overlooked the impact of storms, wildfires, or floods on those communities. In short, a significant gap exists in our thinking about rural resilience. The problem is profound, as 97% of the nation\u27s land mass is considered rural.4 Drawing on stories and data gathered from northwest Florida and southwest Georgia\u27s ongoing recovery from Hurricane Michael (2018), this Article examines significant shortcomings in state planning and disaster recovery policies that left smaller rural communities, farmers, and forestland owners fundamentally unprepared for a major disaster. The challenges encountered by rural communities in carrying out long-term disaster recovery highlight critical questions about perils associated with rural futures in an era of climate change and sea level rise. The post-disaster solutions devised by state governments suggest opportunities and obstacles to realizing *1723 more sustainable and equitable paths for the 20% of Americans living in rural municipalities and counties.5 This Article proceeds as follows. Part I provides a general overview of the damage caused by Hurricane Michael\u27s destructive push through the small towns and less densely populated counties of northwest Florida and southwest Georgia. Part II briefly explores commentary and scholarship covering the challenges associated with responses to major disasters affecting rural communities. Part III examines the heightened vulnerability that rural regions face when disasters threaten the continuing viability of historic land uses and the economies they support. Part IV assesses the role that institutions can play in sustaining rural land uses and does so by considering the institutional obstacles and opportunities that one state navigated to deliver recovery resources to agriculture and silviculture businesses. Part V highlights Hurricane Michael\u27s anemic housing recovery and suggests ways that states could expand solutions to disaster-related housing loss and thus move more to jumpstart long-term transformative housing recovery
Environmental Migration in Regional Human Rights Courts: A Lifeboat from the “Sinking Vessel”
No full textAccording to various estimates, millions of people are at risk of being driven from their homes by climate change and other environmental factors in the coming decades. A set of cases that have arisen in international and domestic courts concern environmental non-refoulement a jurisprudence seeking to block the removal of individuals to countries where they will face significant human rights risk due to environmental degradation. However, while human rights courts in the European, Inter-American, and African systems have confronted a number of non-refoulement claims and have made significant contributions to jurisprudence in this area, these regional courts all have yet to hear an environmental non-refoulement case. In this article, I examine what these courts will and should do when presented with such a claim.
The leading international and domestic cases on environmental non-refoulement have mostly recognized the grave human rights threats posed by environmental crises but denied relief under the particular sets of facts presented. In making these decisions, courts have varied in their consideration of key questions, including the required imminence of the harm to human rights, the necessary specificity of the harm, and the special protections available to groups in vulnerable situations. By examining both the non-refoulement and environmental jurisprudence of regional human rights courts, I argue that with respect to these three elements imminence, specificity, and vulnerability such courts would apply a more flexible standard than international and domestic courts and thus would protect more people from the human rights harms caused by environmental crises. I further argue that environmental non-refoulement rulings from regional human rights courts will make a significant contribution to environmental jurisprudence and address migration driven by environmental factors
Longitudinal Policy Surveillance of Private Insurance Hearing Aid Mandates in the United States: 1997–2022
No full textObjectives. To produce a database of private insurance hearing aid mandates in the United States and quantify the share of privately insured individuals covered by a mandate. Methods. We used health-related policy surveillance methods to create a database of private insurance hearing aid mandates through January 2023. We coded salient features of mandates and combined policy data with American Community Survey and Medicare Expenditure Panel Survey-Insurance Component data to estimate the share of privately insured US residents covered by a mandate from 2008 to 2022. Results. A total of 26 states and 1 territory had private insurance hearing aid mandates. We found variability for mandate exceptions, maximum age eligibility, allowable frequency of benefit use, and coverage amounts. Between 2008 and 2022 the proportion of privately insured youths (aged ≤ 18 years) living where there was a private insurance hearing aid mandate increased from 3.4% to 18.7% and the proportion of privately insured adults (19-64 years) increased from 0.3% to 4.6%. Conclusions. Hearing aid mandates cover a small share of US residents. Mandate exceptions in several states limit coverage, particularly for adults. Public Health Implications. A federal mandate would improve hearing aid access. States can also improve access by adopting exception-free mandates with limited utilization management and no age restrictions. (Am J Public Health. 2024;114(4):407-414. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2023.307551)
Public Health Grand Rounds: Misinformation, Law, and Public Health after COVID-19
No full textThroughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the public was deluged with misinformation about the COVID-19 virus and potential responses to it, particularly on social media. Though rampant misinformation on social media is disturbing, it is perhaps more troubling when, as Professors Claudia Haupt and Wendy Parmet have explored, such misinformation is endorsed and shared by medical professionals, government health officials, and elected representatives. Most discussions of misinformation in any of these forms have focused on how misinformation may have impacted individual decisions, such as the decision to get vaccinated or to wear a mask. This presentation will focus instead on how misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic shaped laws that remain in effect and now constrain the government’s ability to respond to a wide
range of public health issues. This presentation will also consider the ways in which misinformation has historically shaped law, and whether the instrumentalization of misinformation in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic constituted a novel phenomenon
