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Online Engagement on Equal Terms
No full textIn 2007, when the media started covering the phenomenon of cyber harassment, the public’s reaction was disheartening. Although the abuse often involved threats, defamation, and privacy invasions, commentators dismissed it as “no big deal.” Harassment was viewed as part of the bargain of online engagement. Proposals for legal intervention were met with fierce opposition because law could jeopardize the Internet’s role as a forum for public discourse. Curiously absent from discussions about the Internet’s speech-facilitating role was individuals’ difficulty expressing themselves in the face of online assaults
Comment on Amendment-Metrics: The Good, the Bad and the Frequently Amended Constitution
Get PDFThis comment assesses Xenophon Contiades and Alkmene Fotiadou’s critique of arguments that long, frequently amended constitutions tend to be bad constitutions. It also criticizes their analysis of the purposes of amendment, arguing that most amendments, in some way, aim to respond to imperfections or correct flaws in existing constitutions. Furthermore (drawing on the analysis of John Marshall), the comment sketches some general criteria for a good constitution: that it should be a “great outline,” not a detailed legal code; that it should be difficult to amend; and that it should not be amended frequently. Finally (building on the analysis of Jack Balkin), it maintains that a good constitution would be capable of serving as “basic law,” “higher law,” and “our law.
Preserving Public Trust and Demanding Accountability (Introduction to Part II)
No full textThe President and CEO of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) recently said that “there is one great problem that seriously challenges the ability of America’s research-based pharmaceutical companies to . . . research and develop new cures and treatments. In a word, it is trust” (Pricewaterhouse Coopers’ Health Research Institute 2006). This section includes four chapters that explore the role of the drug and device industries, in this time when public trust has eroded. In two chapters, Patrick O’Leary and Katrice Bridges Copeland address the strategies that the United States government uses to prosecute industry transgressions. Alla Digilova, Barbara Bierer, Mark Barnes, and Rebecca Li discuss trends toward transparency in clinical trial data, which end an industry monopoly on this information. Genevieve Pham-Kanter provides a novel empirical analysis, which shows how industry financial ties are related to the votes of U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory board members
Understanding State Constitutions: Locke and Key
Get PDFSteve Calabresi and Sofia Vickery have done a great service by uncovering the pre-Fourteenth Amendment case law in state courts interpreting and applying state constitutional provisions which contain Lockean language guaranteeing rights to life, liberty, property, safety, happiness, or some combination of those rights.\u27 These cases are manifestly one of the keys to understanding the legal world in which the Fourteenth Amendment was crafted and ratified. It is instructive and fascinating to see the development and application of these Lockean provisions, whose influence 2 seems to have spread beyond this country. It is a pleasure and honor to be asked to comment on this article
Toil and Technology: Innovative Technology is Displacing Workers to New Jobs Rather Than Replacing Them Entirely
No full textAt the Quiet Logistics distribution center north of Boston in the United States, a robot lifts a shelf and transports it through the warehouse to a workstation. There, an employee picks an item from the shelf and places it in a shipping box. Each robot in the distribution center does the work of one and a half humans.
Robots and other technologies are transforming supply chains, tracking items from source to consumer, minimizing shipping time and cost, automating clerical tasks, and more. But are they eliminating the need for human workers, leading to persistent technological unemployment
Scarce Skills, Not Scarce Jobs
No full textAt a large distribution center located north of Boston, a robot lifts a shelf holding merchandise and navigates it through the warehouse to the workstation of an employee who then picks the item needed for an order and places it in a shipping box. Incoming orders are processed by a computer that sends picking requests to sixty-nine robots. Then, the robots deliver storage units to roughly a hundred workers, saving the workers the task of walking through the warehouse to find the items. In other distribution centers, this is work that warehouse workers do.
The distribution center, run by Quiet Logistics—a company that fills orders for sellers of premium-branded apparel, is featured in the 60 Minutes episode “Are Robots Hurting Job Growth?” In the segment, Steve Kroft poses the following question to Bruce Welty, the CEO of Quiet Logistics: If you had to replace the robots with people, how many people would you have to hire? Welty estimates that he would have to hire one and a half people for every robot, and that the robots are saving him a lot of money
Harmonizing Third-Party Litigation Funding Regulation
Get PDFThird-party litigation funding is no longer a new phenomenon, but rather is a mainstay in global commerce and dispute resolution. Yet many observers still consider the third-party litigation funding industry as a “wild west” due to a lack of regulation in many countries. Some of the countries that have regulations suffer from a lack of uniformity and an array of conflicting laws at the sub-national level (i.e., the laws of states, provinces, territories, etc.). For example, the United States has a confusing patchwork of state laws on third-party litigation funding. This Article proposes harmonizing the regulatory framework for third-party litigation funding in the United States by identifying the three categories of interactions— transactional, procedural, and ethical—that make up third-party litigation funding, and suggesting avenues for regulation within those three categories. This approach will weave a regulatory “safety net” of minimum standards for the behaviors and interactions of the players in third-party litigation funding arrangements to ensure the integrity of the dispute resolution system in which they invest and participate
Comments on the OECD\u27s \u27Due Diligence Guidance for Meaningful Stakeholder Engagement in the Extractives Sector\u27
Get PDFProfessor Lisa Laplante of New England Law | Boston’s Center for International Law and Policy (CILP) and Professor Erika George of the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law’s Center for Global Justice respectfully submitted this collaborative commentary in response to the OECD’s Draft Due Diligence Guidance for Meaningful Stakeholder Engagement in the Extractives Sector which build off of the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises which offer comprehensive recommendations to promote responsible business conduct. The 2011 revisions to the OECD MNE Guidelines introduced an important new provision on stakeholder engagement. Pursuant to the provision, multinational enterprises should: “engage with relevant stakeholders in order to provide meaningful opportunities for their views to be taken into account in relation to planning and decision making for projects or other activities that may significantly impact local communities.” Beyond meaningful stakeholder engagement, the OECD MNE Guidelines provide that multinational enterprises should: “carry out risk-based due diligence…to identify, prevent and mitigate actual and potential adverse impacts…and account for how these impacts are addressed.”
Because the nature of business in the extractive sector often requires a long term presence in a particular location and large capital and infrastructure investments meaningful stakeholder engagement is especially important for enterprises engaged in the business of resource extraction. Moreover, the extensive social, economic and environmental impacts often associated with particular business practices warrants serious consideration of the interests of multiple stakeholders. Understanding extractive sector enterprises to include enterprises conducting exploration, development, extraction, processing, transport, and/or storage of oil, gas and minerals, it is a critically important sector for the global economy. For that reason the OECD developed these recent Guidelines
Expanding the Array of Accountable Actors: Human Rights and Corporate Social Responsibility
Get PDFAdditional actors are being asked to assume responsibility for protecting human rights and preventing violations. I argue that it is appropriate and important to expand the human rights paradigm into other arenas, including corporate social responsibility. Expanding the array of actors understood to have a responsibility to respect human rights could serve to aid an under-resourced and overburdened human rights system to advance the rights protections that it was created to promote. While human rights activists have traditionally turned to intergovernmental institutions and state governments to protect rights and to remedy violations, the recent trend is to expand our understanding of the range of actors responsible for impacting the enjoyment of human rights. Chief among the actors attracting additional attention are transnational business enterprises. Activists allege that corporations are complicit in human rights violations in a range of contexts and must be held accountable. For example, Nestle was alleged to have aided and abetted child slavery in the Ivory Coast.\u27 Yahoo! was alleged to have been complicit in the imprisonment of political dissidents in China.2 Chevron and Total were accused of propping up a military junta in Burma.
Litigation against corporations for alleged complicity in human rights violation has stalled in some jurisdictions. For example, the Supreme Court of the United States has held that in most instances a presumption against extraterritoriality will preclude recognition of causes of action for violations of the law of nations that occur within the territory of other sovereign states. 4 Nevertheless, demands for remedy and accountability have only accelerated