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Rainforest Production Holdings, Inc., derivative suit, Order on Cross Motions for Summary Judgment
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Health Reform Reconstruction
No full textThis Article connects the failed, inequitable U.S. coronavirus pandemic response to conceptual and structural constraints that have held back U.S health reform for decades and calls for reconstruction. For more than a half-century, a cramped “iron triangle” ethos has constrained health reform conceptually. Reforms aimed to balance individual interests in cost, quality, and access to health care, while marginalizing equity, solidarity, and public health. In the iron triangle era, reforms unquestioningly accommodated four legally and logistically entrenched fixtures--individualism, fiscal fragmentation, privatization, and federalism--that distort and diffuse any reach toward social justice. The profound racial disparities and public health failures of the U.S. pandemic response have agonizingly manifested the limitations of pre-2020 health reform and demand a reconstruction. Health reform reconstruction begins with a new conceptual framework that aims to realize health justice. Health justice requires commitments to anti-racism, equitable distribution of the burdens and benefits of public investments in health care and public health (for which health care access, quality, and cost are useful, but not exhaustive, metrics), and community empowerment. These commitments put health justice on a collision course with the fixtures of individualism, fiscal fragmentation, privatization, and federalism. Thus, incremental reforms must be measured by the extent to which they confront these fixtures. This Article describes how health reform reconstruction can chart the path for legal change and proposes “confrontational incrementalism” as a method for recognizing the necessity of reconstructive reform, along with its near impossibility
Evaluating the Implementation of Human Rights Law: A Data Analytics Research Agenda
No full textHuman rights law relies on national-level implementation and enforcement to give it full meaning. The United Nations\u27 mandatory reporting process, a built-in component of all major human rights treaties, enables monitoring and evaluation of countries\u27 progress toward human rights goals. However, the operation and effectiveness of this process have been largely under-studied. This Article lays the foundations for a data analytics research agenda that can help assess the reporting process and inform human rights law implementation. As a first step, we use a relatively new set of computational tools to evaluate the Concluding Observations issued by a human rights treaty body, the Committee on the Rights of the Child. The Concluding Observations provide both an appraisal of states\u27 practices and a set of recommendations that act as an agenda for the state going forward. Using text and data analytics tools, we mined the text of Concluding Observations issued by the Committee on the Rights of the Child over a twenty-seven-year period to identify the topics addressed in each report and parsed the language of these reports to determine the tenor and tone of the Committee\u27s discussion. We then mapped our findings by state and year, to form a detailed descriptive picture of what the Committee has said, and how the Committee has delivered its message(s), across both geography and time. In doing so, we hope to show how these data analytics tools can contribute to a deeper understanding of the Committee\u27s work and, more broadly, of the effectiveness of the reporting process in securing and protecting human rights
The Astounding Growth of Big Tech and the Lack of Enforcement of Intellectual Property, Antitrust, and Contract Laws
No full textPraxis and Paradox: Inside the Black Box of Eviction Court
No full textIn the American legal system, we typically conceive of legal disputes as governed by specific rules and procedures, resolved in a formalized court setting, with lawyers shepherding both parties through an adversarial process involving the introduction of evidence and burdens of proof. The often- highlighted exception to this understanding is the mass, assembly-line processing of cases, whether civil or criminal, in large, urban, lower-level courts. The gap left unfilled by either of these two narratives is how “court” functions for the average unrepresented litigant in smaller and nonurban jurisdictions across the United States.
For many tenants facing eviction, elements of the “typical” formal legal process are absent, resulting in an experience that only loosely resembles what is taught in law school. This Article is based on a first-of-its-kind interdisciplinary, multi-year, mixed-methods study of suburban and rural dispossessory (eviction) courts in Georgia that aims to contribute to the knowledge gap described above. Through detailed quantitative analysis of case files and qualitative data gleaned from court observation and stakeholder
interviews, and its unique focus on courts outside of a major city, it provides a clearer picture of how eviction court in such jurisdictions operates in practice and what resulting variations in process mean for case outcomes.
Ultimately, this Article demonstrates that while one set of laws may govern throughout the state, the process for applying and enforcing those laws is highly localized, dependent on the nature of place and the attitudes of the stakeholders involved. While smaller, lower-volume courts have fewer caseload pressures and appear to prioritize procedural justice, the process they conduct functions less like a traditional legal proceeding and more as a vehicle for rent collection. Paradoxically, elements typically associated with fair process—like the opportunity to respond to legal claims through filing an answer or the scheduling of a hearing on the merits—do not always manifest in substantively improved outcomes for tenants, given the structure of the underlying law. The Article concludes by reflecting on what these observations suggest about the limitations and effectiveness of different forms of legal assistance and how court processes, regardless of their locale and the people who operate within them, can maximize access to justice
