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HB 286: Restricting Local and Municipal Governments\u27 Ability to Reduce Police Department Funding
Get PDFThe Act primarily functions to restrict the ability of county and municipal or consolidated government authorities to reduce funding for county and municipal police departments. In addition, the Act provides exceptions for police departments with less than twenty-five officers
Close the Sores of War : Why Georgia Needs New Legislation to Address Its Confederate Monuments
Get PDFConfederate monuments have been a point of contention in America for decades, but a series of events since 2015 have stoked the most recent movement calling for their removal. In 2015, Dylann Roof murdered Black churchgoers at a historically Black church in Charleston, South Carolina. Because Roof was seemingly motivated and emboldened by Confederate ideology, many focused their attention on removing the more than 700 Confederate monuments throughout the country. Then, in August 2017, a large white nationalist rally assembled in Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee from Charlottesville’s Emancipation Park. The demonstrations turned violent when a white nationalist barreled his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing one and injuring nineteen more. Finally, in May 2020, the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, at the hands of a White police officer catapulted the removal movement to a peak.
In response to these events, some states swiftly removed Confederate monuments from their public spaces, but in 2019, Georgia bolstered its monument-protection laws, tightening restrictions on local control by outright barring monument removal. This leaves localities—the ones who actually own much of the public property on which these monuments sit—without recourse. Several Georgia localities have nonetheless removed Confederate monuments from their grounds, but since these actions conflict directly with Georgia state law, they are vulnerable to litigation.
Monuments maintained in public spaces are means of expression that necessarily convey political narratives. Thus, by prohibiting monument removal, Georgia has prevented its localities from speaking their own narratives. Further, preemptively precluding monument removal undermines community engagement and erases any possibility of democratic consensus building.
To remedy this problem, this Note argues that Georgia should amend its monument-protection laws to return the power to local communities by affording them myriad options—including contextualization, removal, and destruction—to address their Confederate monuments. This Note proposes that Georgia adopt a monument-protection statute similar to Virginia’s monument-protection statute that provides a democratic forum for discussion and ultimately allows localities to manage their own public spaces
On the Restorative Power of Nature, or Why Every Neighborhood Needs a Public Japanese Garden
Get PDFIn celebration of Professor Arthur C. “Chris” Nelson’s illustrious career and our shared ambles in academia and in gardens in Japan, we offer this essay on public health and public gardens, namely gardens in the traditional Japanese style and how they could play an important role in addressing pressing public health issues in urban areas in the U.S. (and elsewhere)
Our Cities, Ourselves
Get PDFJust as we are what we eat, we are where we live. We breathe the air, drink the water and inhabit the built and natural landscapes. We make our places and they, in turn, make us. While great places nourish body and soul, poor environmental and urban quality challenges us physically as well as emotionally. How might we heal our places, so that they sustain us, rather than strain us
Perspectives on Choice of Law Challenges in Multistate Precision Medicine Research
No full textFederal law establishes minimum standards for protecting human research participants, but many states have enacted laws that may apply to research. Precision medicine research in particular implicates state laws that govern an array of topics, including human subjects research, genetic testing, and both general and genetic privacy and discrimination. Thus, the determination of which state’s laws apply, and under what circumstances, can substantially alter participant rights and protections. To shed light on this topic, we conducted interviews with experts in law, human research protections, and precision medicine research. Our goal was to better understand their experiences with choice of law issues, the effects of state law variation on research practices and stakeholder groups, and approaches to addressing such variation. Interviewees were aware of state-based variation in laws that could be applied to research. However, the extent to which they perceived such variability as problematic differed, as did their perceptions of stakeholder roles and responsibilities for addressing state law variation, and their estimations of requisite knowledge among IRBs and researchers. These divergent perspectives create an ethical and legal quandary, and further empirical and normative work is needed to fully characterize the implications of substantive differences in participant rights and protections
Lying at Plea Bargaining
Get PDFThis Article describes the regular use of lying during plea bargaining by criminal justice stakeholders and the paradox it presents for those who care about creating a fairer criminal legal system. The paradox is this: lying at plea bargaining allows defendants the opportunity to negotiate fair resolutions to their cases in the face of a deeply unfair system, even as that lying makes way for—and sustains—the problematic system it seeks to avoid.
The Article lays out a taxonomy of lying at plea bargaining by organizing the types of lies into three categories: lies about facts, lies about law, and lies about process. The criminal justice system produces a litany of injustices. Implicitly authorized, systemic lying offers a means of dealing with these perceived injustices. But lying also obscures the system from public view by hiding and relieving pressure points via plea bargaining.
What seems like the natural solution—to make the system more transparent and less flexible—would likely harm individual defendants. If lying at plea bargaining disappeared tomorrow, many defendants would suffer dire consequences, such as deportation for minor charges or subjection to outrageous mandatory minimum sentences. These defendants would lose their ability to avoid the injustices of the system. Yet lying at plea bargaining is the result of a series of interlocking mandatory laws and rules that many stakeholders believe are deeply unfair and should be reformed. Thus, lying at plea bargaining is both a means of avoiding injustice and a force prohibiting meaningful reformation of the laws and rules that produce such injustice. Examining this paradox leads to the conclusion that reform must focus on overhaul, not piecemeal correction. In a system so entangled that lying is the only way to reach a just resolution, solutions that focus simply on producing more transparency or flexibility are unlikely to lead to meaningful transformation
Longstanding Underfunding of the Indian Health Service
No full textDonald Warne, the Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Director of the Indians Into Medicine and Public Health Programs, and Professor of Family and Community Medicine at the School of Medicine and Health Sciences at the University of North Dakota, discusses the ethical issues arising from the longstanding underfunding of the Indian Health Services
What’s in Your Glass? Whether Milk Labels Should be Based on Creation Process or End Product (Part II of III)
Get PDFPart II of this blog series analyzes arguments made both by proponents and opponents of product-based meat labeling, then applies this framework to the milk-labeling debate
Executive Capture of Agency Decisionmaking
No full textThe scientific credibility of the administrative state is under siege in the United States, risking distressful public health harms and even deaths. This Article addresses one component of this attack—executive interference in agency scientific decisionmaking. It offers a new conceptual framework, “internal agency capture,” and policy prescription for addressing excessive overreach and interference by the executive branch in the scientific decisionmaking of federal agencies. The Article’s critiques and analysis toggle a timeline that reflects recent history and that urges forward-thinking approaches to respond to executive overreach in agency scientific decisionmaking. Taking the Trump Administration and other presidencies as test cases, it scrutinizes who should control, or alternatively advance or limit, an agency’s scientific decisions, which are distinct from its policymaking decisions. With its “internal agency capture” framework and the COVID-19 pandemic as its backdrop, the Article illustrates the phenomenon of excessive executive overreach at work in the scientific decisionmaking of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”), glaringly reflected in the Agency’s decisions on reproductive medicines and protocols to respond to the pandemic. This Article demonstrates that covert internal capture can mislead the public, pose serious risks to individual and public health, undermine the arm’s-length neutrality and objectivity of agencies, and result in lasting consequences for agency legitimacy and reputation.
The Article considers existing methods to oversee and provide a check on internal agency capture and describes the limitations of these approaches. It offers a novel solution, the creation of a new and independent Scientific Integrity Office, which would address many of these limitations and promote the important values of accountability, credibility, and public trust