5033 research outputs found
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International Chamber of Commerce Arbitration, 4th ed.
No full texthttps://scholarship.law.bu.edu/books/1247/thumbnail.jp
The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America
No full texthttps://scholarship.law.bu.edu/clark_speakers/1116/thumbnail.jp
The Innocence Trap
No full textWhat makes a conviction wrongful? Developments in DNA science have led to a wave of exonerations over the past thirty years, revealing sources of error in the criminal legal process. Innocence organizations proliferated to represent people whose convictions could be overturned by newly discovered evidence. This is vital work for the individuals who are released and for the purpose of systemic change. At the same time, a focus on exonerations constructs a relatively narrow conception of wrongful convictions -- one that is synonymous with factual innocence
Can Legal Knowledge Save Lives? A Randomized Experiment in Preventive Health Screenings
Full text linkWhile the U.S. healthcare system typically imposes significant out-of-pocket costs, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) requires full insurance coverage for certain preventive health services (PHS), including cancer screenings, without cost-sharing. Despite this policy, one in four eligible Americans remains unscreened for breast, colorectal, and cervical cancer, which increases their risk of premature death. We hypothesize that a lack of awareness about the ACA’s free care requirement contributes to this gap and that explicitly informing patients could increase screening uptake. Additionally, we investigate whether prior experiences with medical debt deter individuals from seeking even cost-free care, reflecting a spillover effect of broader healthcare cost burdens.
We conducted an online survey experiment with 3,354 insured U.S. adults aged 30–74 with moderate household incomes (99k), and we determined whether each one was qualified for a free cancer screen based on age and sex. Among them, 1,406 had not received at least one recommended cancer screening. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions in a 2×2 factorial design. In the “free care disclosure” (FCD) treatment, half were informed that ACA-required screenings are fully covered without copays or deductibles. In the “medical debt salience” (MDS) treatment, half were asked about their medical debt history before assessing screening intentions. In addition to measures of intention, the primary outcome was behavioral—whether participants requested a link to take a step toward screening, a proxy for screening behavior, which we were not able to observe directly. We also tracked self-expressed intentions to get screened.
As hypothesized, FCD increased screening-related action by 5 percentage points (p = .031). Effects varied by cancer type, with larger effects for colon and cervical cancers, but with no impact—and a potential negative (non-significant) effect—for breast cancer screening. Survey responses were consistent with this experimental finding for FCD overall, with “costs or coverage” being the third most common reason respondents cited for having not gotten screening (at 45% of respondents), and with large majorities agreeing that “going to the doctor or hospital can be dangerous financially” (80% agreeing), “the American healthcare system is full of tricks and traps” (65% agreeing) and “in America, healthcare is never really free” (91% agreeing). MDS had no direct effect on behavior, but contrary to hypothesis, individuals with medical debt were more likely to seek screening than those without (p = .011).
These findings suggest that lack of awareness about the law providing free preventive care is a significant barrier to screening. Proactive communication by clinicians or public health officials could save lives. The larger paradigm of cost-exposure has a negative spillover, and ignorance of this benefit may be a preventable cause of cancer-related mortality
Uncorrected
No full textIn addition to making rules and deciding outcomes, the legal system generates, curates and shares information. When the system gets rules and outcomes wrong, it is obviously a problem, and much effort (and scholarly attention) goes into identifying those mistakes and fixing them. But the system also gets information wrong; a problem mostly overlooked by policymakers and scholars. Those information mistakes matter too: they are prevalent and harmful. We show here that even when the mistakes are widely known and the errors broadly acknowledged, the information very often goes uncorrected. As a result, people make decisions based on bad information from a system that should be trustworthy and authoritative: builders build houses in mislabeled flood plains, patients use medical devices that are not really safe and effective, background checks disqualify potential employees based on crimes they did not commit, and inventors rely on falsified data in patent disclosures, to name a few. Why are so many legal information mistakes uncorrected? We identify multiple reasons, including lack of support for public correction mechanisms, lack of robust private mechanisms, challenges in communication between institutions, and an overreliance on self-interest. An underlying problem, though, is that information mistakes just are not given enough focus as the major trans-substantive problem they are. That is its own mistake, because in a world where an increasing number of decisions incorporate an increasing amount of information, mistakes in that information matter more and more. Thankfully, technology makes that task somewhat easier, as does increased attention toward improving incentives and allocating responsibility. It is worth tackling the problem of the legal system’s uncorrected information mistakes; this Article charts steps in that direction
New Guidance on Responsible Use of AI
No full textArtificial intelligence (AI) has moved rapidly into clinical application, such as imaging and other diagnostics, ambient scribing, and decision support. It has brought both potential benefits and important risks. In the US, it is unclear who has the responsibility to set the rules, validate the models, and, ultimately, pay when things go wrong. Against this backdrop, the Joint Commission (TJC, the primary US hospital accreditor) has partnered with the Coalition for Health AI (CHAI, a clinician-led group that includes industry and stakeholders). Together, they have issued new guidance on responsible use of AI in health care,1 which builds on prior statements from many groups, including the American Medical Association.
Core recommendations include establishing multidisciplinary AI governance committees, validating models on local patient data and workflows before deployment, and instituting continuous postmarket monitoring for drift, performance degradation, or bias
Communicative Legitimacy: The Supreme Court\u27s Hidden Cultural Binaries in the U.S. Civil Sphere
No full textHow does the U.S. Supreme Court establish its legitimacy? Over the last two hundred years in U.S. society, the Court has interpreted the U.S. Constitution on watershed issues such as slavery, segregation, and marriage equality. And yet the Constitution is just 7,591 words. A puzzle thus emerges: how does the Court intelligibly interpret this short text for U.S. society? This article develops a new theoretical and empirical cultural sociological account of such Supreme Court decision-making, which it calls “communicative legitimacy.” According to this theory, which draws on Jeffrey Alexander’s civil sphere theory, the Court consistently and inevitably draws on a shared American cultural discourse, thus rendering Constitutional values intelligible and legitimate to the broader civil sphere. This article shows this through two historical case studies. First, it explores the cases guaranteeing and then overturning the right to abortion, from Roe v. Wade (1973) to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022). Second, it reviews the cases guaranteeing the right to bear arms, beginning with District of Columbia v. Heller (2008). The two sets of cases, at first blush, appear diametrically opposed: Roe is a triumph for the left, Heller a victory for the right. But, in fact, these cases reveal the same pattern: the Court’s defenders draw on the discourse of liberty to hail the decision as a restoration of the Constitution, while the opposition draws on the discourse of repression to accuse the Court of “creating a Constitutional right out of nowhere.” This article thus unveils a hidden Supreme Court meta-language, contributing a new cultural sociological understanding of the Supreme Court as a societal institution with unique communicative authority and symbolic power in U.S. societ
Before the Movement: Hidden Histories of Black Civil Rights
No full texthttps://scholarship.law.bu.edu/clark_speakers/1124/thumbnail.jp
Spending Programs and the New Roberts Court
Full text linkThe Supreme Court is poised to place new limits on Congress’s spending power at the urging of states vying for regulatory dominance, particularly in health care and public health. This article is the first to highlight and catalog the throughlines of argumentation, which sparked after states successfully challenged the ACA but have grown into opposing more than Medicaid’s cooperative federalism. This means federal and state programs that heavily rely on federal spending power are at risk, so studying this pattern is imperative. The article begins with a descriptive account of increasing spending power challenges, which make use of converging factors that include the Court’s revived federalism revolution, demonstrated willingness to revisit precedent, and heightened formalism. Part I incorporates three recent Supreme Court decisions into this landscape: Health and Hospital Corporation v. Talevski, Medina v. Planned Parenthood, and Moyle v. U.S. Part II provides a theoretical roadmap that categorizes and analyzes patterns in litigation currently challenging spending programs. This mapping reveals four lines of argumentation, three testing the breadth of the spending power and one that would limit private enforcement. At least two of the theories are likely to gain traction; indeed, Medina showed some shifts in language, theory, and doctrine. Additionally, these theories cite federalism principles rooted in a dual-sovereignty governance paradigm. But conditional spending relies on cooperative federalism, which is characterized more by porosity than by bright lines. Accordingly, Part III considers gaps and ramifications in these efforts, which could produce shifts in the scope, interpretation, and enforcement of longstanding social programs. Congress may not choose to work more with states if the spending power becomes harder to exercise; and, states depend on federal funding for the safety net’s fiscal stability. Also, federal spending has often protected civil rights, so limits on spending programs may contribute to retrenchment
Informed Applicants: Anti-Discrimination Enforcement Based on the Use of Criminal Records
No full textNavigating the labor market with a criminal record is treacherous. Countless job applicants will be turned down immediately after a potential employer learns they have had contact with the criminal legal system. Criminal records reflect and exacerbate long-standing racial and economic inequalities in the United States. Thus, the use of records in employment decisions will often implicate anti-discrimination laws. However, successfully enforcing these protections requires job applicants to, at minimum, understand why they were not hired. Many applicants never learn why they were not hired and thus will never be able to protect their rights. This Article argues that understanding and changing laws governing the visibility of criminal records, and in particular the timing of when employers can learn about applicants’ criminal histories, can help applicants enforce their rights under anti-discrimination laws.
To do so, this Article leverages new data from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) on the frequency and quality of complaints alleging hiring discrimination based on improper consideration of criminal records. It presents empirical evidence that policies delaying inquiries into criminal histories (“Ban the Box” policies) generate statistically significantly more—and more successful— complaints. Applicants’ lack of information about employer decision-making impedes the enforcement of anti-discrimination laws. Therefore, policies that simultaneously increase applicant information and restrict employer information may improve enforcement.
There are potential costs of delaying employer inquiry into criminal records. This Article reviews evidence that Ban the Box (BTB) may lead to employers increasingly deploying racial discrimination in hiring. It argues that the use of new technology, such as computer-generated “fake” job applicants (“correspondence” and “audit” studies), may help improve anti-discrimination enforcement while mitigating the risks of BTB policies. The cost of deploying this tool has dramatically declined in recent years, and it has been used by researchers, government agencies, and non-profits. With almost 1,000,000 fake resumes sent out in the past twenty years, this approach may be able to mitigate some of the risks of BTB policies. Still, it also generates risks of its own by throwing additional friction and uncertainty into the hiring market (e.g., raising the possibility of “ghost applicants” applying to “ghost jobs”). Correspondence studies can help the EEOC detect and pursue claims against discriminatory firms, which may help mitigate potential criticisms of BTB