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Land-Use Planning and Urban Governance: Lessons from the Pandemic
Get PDFIt is a privilege to have been invited to contribute to this festschrift for a scholar whose work I have known and admired for decades. We have explored and debated together many aspects of land-use planning in our respective jurisdictions over that time, including a protracted effort in the 1990s to develop a model for impact fees for the UK planning system. Several other contributors to this festschrift were also part of that team, from which all of us learned a great deal. One is that complex systems of government develop deep resistance to change, and that it often takes a radical external threat to compel us all to step back and think again about not just the processes by which decisions are taken—fascinating though they are for planning lawyers such as myself—but the outcomes for people. The Second World War, with its huge threat to the lives of the civilian population, was followed by an era of transformational political and societal change in the United Kingdom. Is it too much to hope that the coronavirus pandemic, which has so far claimed many more civilian lives, might be the starting point for the changes needed for the twenty-first century? The tools of the last century, in healthcare and land-use planning, have been found wanting in the face of the global pandemic
From the Abacus to Big Data: The Evolution of Data-Driven Planning in the U.S. and Where the Field will be Headed
Get PDFThe nature of planning involves a set of decision-making processes to fulfill people’s needs and expectations of where they live, work, and play. Dealing with the nature of planning—complexity, uncertainty, and disagreement—requires specific tools to explore various aspects of the built environment as a whole. Various types of data have been extracted, transformed, and loaded to describe the past and current conditions of the built environment, and planners have developed and applied data-driven planning tools to explore the knowns and unknowns of the urban futures and transform them into a set of actions based on the goals with consensus. This article identifies the evolution of systematic ways of collecting data, setting up criteria, and analyzing them according to the contextual features of planning tools, focusing on where the field is headed for planning
Planning the Opportunity Metropolis: An Agenda for an Era of Intensifying Technology, Climate and Health Challenges
Get PDFUrban planners focus on the spatial arrangements of residences, businesses, institutions, infrastructure and human-built amenities, and the market- and government-driven processes that shape these arrangements. They start with the basic supposition that these arrangements strongly affect individuals’ health, prosperity, and happiness as well as the overall level of opportunity, solidarity, and satisfaction in society. Their recommendations about changing the built environment should be guided by the norms of efficiency and equity, with the latter being framed as creating disproportionate benefits to those who are least advantaged.
This essay begins with an overview of the metropolitan opportunity structure theory to frame how we are influenced by cities and what justice requires if we are to create an equal opportunity society. It then outlines the potential effects of imminent changes in technology, climate, and health on furthering spatial inequalities. Finally, it advances a bold agenda for thwarting these undesirable consequences
Catchall Policing and the Fourth Amendment
No full textAmerican police do a bit of everything. They direct traffic, resolve private disputes, help the sick and injured, and do animal control. Far less frequently than one might think, they make arrests. Americans reflexively call the police for troubles, big and small. The “catchall tradition” is shorthand for this melding of non-adversarial, public assistance with adversarial, crime-control functions. The catchall tradition means that civilians are exposed to the police\u27s coercive power as a condition of receiving police help. This Article contends that the catchall tradition is antithetical to constitutional police regulation. The Supreme Court has distinguished adversarial from non-adversarial state action, often imposing less Fourth Amendment constraint on the latter. The Court recently reaffirmed this distinction in Caniglia v. Strom. But the catchall tradition makes it impossible for the police themselves let alone courts to distinguish between the police\u27s non-adversarial and adversarial functions. This is a problem without a doctrinal solution. The Article thus concludes that meaningful constitutional regulation of police requires remaking police agencies in a more decisively adversarial mold
A Regulatory Budget for the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board
Get PDFThe Public Company Accounting Standards Board (PCAOB) was created by the Sarbanes–Oxley Act (SOX) in 2002 in response to the Enron and WorldCom auditing scandals. The PCAOB regulates the 27 trillion in outstanding global publicly traded equity. The PCAOB is uniquely a quasi-private entity overseen by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which approves its budget and must approve any changes in its rules. The PCAOB has undertaken initiatives to attenuate the cost–benefit calculus of its rules, most notably in a change from Auditing Standard 2 to Auditing Standard 5, to reduce the compliance costs of auditor attestation of internal controls required by § 404(b) of the SOX. This Article provides the SEC with a regulatory budget rubric, crafted on similar models implemented in the United Kingdom and Canada, to help the SEC fulfill its oversight function over the PCAOB by tracking a regulatory budget for the PCAOB
Does Lawyering Matter? Predicting Judicial Decisions from Legal Briefs, and What That Means for Access to Justice
No full textThis study uses linguistic analysis and machine-learning techniques to predict summary judgment outcomes from the text of the briefs filed by parties in a matter. We test the predictive power of textual characteristics, stylistic features, and citation usage, and we find that citations to precedent--their frequency, their patterns, and their popularity in other briefs--are the most predictive of a summary judgment win. This finding suggests that good lawyering may boil down to good legal research. However, good legal research is expensive, and the primacy of citations in our models raises concerns about access to justice. Here, our citation-based models also suggest promising solutions. We propose a freely available, computationally enabled citation identification and brief bank tool, which would extend to all litigants the benefits of good lawyering and open up access to justice
The PREP Act and the Countermeasures Injury Compensation: Past, Present, and Future
No full textThe terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, ushered in an era of legislative reform to bolster the United States\u27 ability to prepare for and respond to public health emergencies, including pandemics and acts of *690 bioterrorism. As part of its post-9/11 response, Congress enacted broad liability protections for, among others, manufacturers of medical countermeasures, along with a corresponding no-fault compensation program for individuals injured by such countermeasures. During public health emergencies like the COVID-19 pandemic, these liability protections play a critical role in encouraging the development and use of medical countermeasures. The no-fault compensation program, however, leaves much to be desired by individuals harmed by countermeasures. The COVID-19 pandemic provides an opportune time to take a fresh look at the compensation program and to consider needed reforms. After describing the liability protections and the corresponding compensation program, this Article unpacks the compensation program\u27s deficiencies and proposes reforms that recognize that liability protections must go hand-in-hand with a robust no-fault injury compensation program
