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Law, Migration, and Health in the US Context
No full textImmigration is a global phenomenon and continues to spark controversary both in the United States and around the world. In this chapter, we focus primarily on immigration’s impact in the United States after the terrorist attacks of September 11 , 2001 , which has caused immigration to be seen through the lens of national security, with massive discrimination based on religion. This includes the contemporary politics of immigration that became so raw during the presidency of Donald Trump, who, as both presidential candidate and president, declared excluding South and Central American refugees and asylum seekers as his number one priority. The theme of the Trump presidency elevated the white nationalist values of those feeling threatened by immigrants, especially those from the His panic South, while continuing religious discrimination through the Muslim ban in 2017 . 8
Immigration is a complex subject with many moving parts, only a few of which are confined to the United States. Nonetheless, we think that by putting the US contemporary experience in the context of the Trump administration’s blatantly anti- immigrant policies, we can identify at least some of the major determinants of health as they affect immigrants seeking to come to the United States primarily as refugees and asylum seekers. These anti- immigrant policies were not born in the Trump administration and will not die with the Trump administration. Many anti- immigrant policies were exaggerated during Trump’s time in office, but nonetheless rep resent policies supported by almost half of the country
Bridging the Computer Science – Law Divide
Get PDFMany pressing societal questions can be answered only by bringing experts from different disciplines together. Questions around misinformation and disinformation, platform power, surveillance capitalism, information privacy, and algorithmic bias, among many others, reside at the intersection of computer science and law. We need to develop institutions that bring together computer scientists and legal scholars to work together on issues like these, and to train new innovators, thought leaders, counselors, and policymakers with hybrid training in both disciplines. In Universities, the disciplines of Computer Science (CS) and Law are separated by many wide chasms. Differences in standards, language, methods, and culture impede professors and other academic researchers who want to collaborate with colleagues on the other side of this divide. Universities place CS and Law in different schools, on different campuses, on different calendars, etc. Researchers in the two disciplines face differing incentives and reward structures for publishing, teaching, funding, and service
Securitizing Notes of Small Businesses and Needy Workers
Get PDFBusinesses, whether large ones or small ones, such as restaurants and small shops, are presently closed and some of their employees have been laid off.1 Currently, the government is lending money to these small businesses2 and the now unemployed workers for their sustenance. It then collects the payments from some of the borrowers and the source of the rest of the money is taxes.3 Since not all, or perhaps only a few, small businesses own real estate, they might sign notes promising to repay the loans but can offer no asset backing. Presumably, the nation’s financial deficit is growing.4 The government adds the aggregate of the loans to the country’s costs and tax collection
The Democratizing Potential Of Algorithms?
Get PDFJurisdictions are increasingly embracing the use of pretrial risk assessment algorithms as a solution to the problem of mass pretrial incarceration. Conversations about the use of pretrial algorithms in legal scholarship have tended to focus on their opacity, determinativeness, reliability, validity, or their (in)ability to reduce high rates of incarceration as well as racial and socioeconomic disparities within the pretrial system. This Article breaks from this tendency, examining these algorithms from a democratization of criminal law perspective. Using this framework, it points out that currently employed algorithms are exclusionary of the viewpoints and values of the racially marginalized communities most impacted by their usage, since these algorithms are often procured, adopted, constructed, and overseen without input from these communities.
This state of affairs should caution enthusiasm for the transformative potential of pretrial algorithms since they reinforce and entrench the democratic exclusion that members of these communities already experience in the creation and implementation of the laws and policies shaping pretrial practices. This democratic exclusion, alongside social marginalization, contributes to the difficulties that these communities face in contesting and resisting the political, social, and economic costs that pretrial incarceration has had and continues to have on them. Ultimately, this Article stresses that resolving this democratic exclusion and its racially stratifying effects might be possible but requires shifting power over pretrial algorithms toward these communities. Unfortunately, the actualization of this prescription may be unreconcilable with the aims sought by algorithm reformers, revealing a deep tension between the algorithm project and racial justice efforts
Legislating Data Loyalty
Get PDFLawmakers looking to embolden privacy law have begun to consider imposing duties of loyalty on organizations trusted with people’s data and online experiences. The idea behind loyalty is simple: organizations should not process data or design technologies that conflict with the best interests of trusting parties. But the logistics and implementation of data loyalty need to be developed if the concept is going to be capable of moving privacy law beyond its “notice and consent” roots to confront people’s vulnerabilities in their relationship with powerful data collectors.
In this short Essay, we propose a model for legislating data loyalty. Our model takes advantage of loyalty’s strengths—it is well-established in our law, it is flexible, and it can accommodate conflicting values. Our Essay also explains how data loyalty can embolden our existing data privacy rules, address emergent dangers, solve privacy’s problems around consent and harm, and establish an antibetrayal ethos as America’s privacy identity.
We propose that lawmakers use a two-step process to (1) articulate a primary, general duty of loyalty, then (2) articulate “subsidiary” duties that are more specific and sensitive to context. Subsidiary duties regarding collection, personalization, gatekeeping, persuasion, and mediation would target the most opportunistic contexts for self-dealing and result in flexible open-ended duties combined with highly specific rules. In this way, a duty of data loyalty is not just appealing in theory—it can be effectively implemented in practice just like the other duties of loyalty our law has recognized for hundreds of years. Loyalty is thus not only flexible, but it is capable of breathing life into America’s historically tepid privacy frameworks
The CRT of Black Lives Matter
Get PDFCritical Race Theory ( CR T ), or at least its principles, stands at the core of most prominent social movements of today-from the resurgence of the #MeToo Movement, which was founded by a Black woman, Tarana Burke, to the Black Lives Matter Movement, which was founded by three Black women: Opal Tometi, Alicia Garza, and Patrisse Cullors. In fact, Critical Race Theorists have long defined CRT itself as a movement, one that has not only provided theoretical interventions regarding the relationship between race, racism, power, and the law, but that has also encouraged and, in fact, inspired and guided social movements. This Essay, adapted from the Richard J. Childress Lecture in October of 2021, highlights how CRT is interwoven throughout the thinking and actions of the Black Lives Matter Movement
Racial Trauma in Civil Rights Representation
Get PDFNarratives of trauma told by clients and communities of color have inspired an increasing number of civil rights and antiracist lawyers and academics to call for more trauma-informed training for law students and lawyers. These advocates have argued not only for greater trauma-sensitive practices and trauma-centered interventions on behalf of adversely impacted individuals and groups but also for greater awareness of the risks of secondary or vicarious trauma for lawyers who represent traumatized clients and communities. In this Article, we join this chorus of attorneys and academics. Harnessing the recent civil rights case of P.P. v. Compton Unified School District, we illustrate how trauma-informed lawyering can both advance civil rights and provide healing for affected communities and individuals. In so doing, we focus our analysis on the use of racial trauma evidence in the Compton school litigation specifically and in contemporary civil rights representation more generally. Building on our prior work on race, cultural trauma, and civil rights lawyering, we investigate the meaning of racial trauma for individual, group, and community clients and for their legal teams while detailing the importance of establishing a trauma-informed practice for today’s civil rights lawyers. This litigation-based investigation shows that sociolegal meaning is bound up in the struggle to accommodate community violence-centered racial trauma advocacy within traditional lawyering processes and legal ethics frameworks. Often overlooked, that ethical and professional struggle affects the form and substance of lawyer decisionmaking and discretion in civil rights cases
American Public Health Federalism and the Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic
Get PDFThis chapter is part of an edited volume studying and comparing federalist government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The chapter first briefly provides an overview of the American public health emergency framework and highlights key leadership challenges that occurred at federal and state levels throughout the first year of the pandemic. Then the chapter examines decentralized responsibility in American social programs and states’ prior policy choices to understand how long-term choices affected short-term emergency response. Finally, the chapter explores long-term ramifications and solutions to the governance difficulties the pandemic has highlighted
“Cancel Culture” and Criminal Justice
Get PDFThis Article explores the relationship between two normative systems in modern society: “cancel culture” and criminal justice. It argues that cancel culture—a ubiquitous phenomenon in contemporary life—may rectify deficiencies of over- and under-enforcement in the U.S. criminal justice system. However, the downsides of cancel culture’s structure—imprecise factfinding, potentially disproportionate sanctions leading to collateral consequences, a “thin” conception of the wrongdoer as beyond rehabilitation, and a broader cultural anxiety that “chills” certain human conduct—reflect problematic U.S. punitive impulses that characterize our era of mass incarceration. This Article thus argues that social media reform proposals obscure a deeper necessity: transcendence of blame through criminal justice reform and, ultimately, collective emphasis on reintegration after human wrongdoing