5033 research outputs found
Sort by
American Legislative Practice
No full textAmerican Legislative Practice examines how legislatures develop and enact statutes through a blend of theory and practical considerations. The author spent several years as a legal counsel and legislative drafter with the Massachusetts Legislature and for the past 15 years has directed the Legislative Policy & Drafting Clinic at Boston University School of Law. Each chapter covers a different aspect of legislative activity: the structure of the legislature, ethical issues, policy development and the legislative process, constitutional issues, legislative drafting, lobbying and advocacy, statutory interpretation by agencies and courts, and legislative oversight.This book is different in a few important ways. First, unlike other law school legislation textbooks, American Legislative Practice does not focus on how judges view and interpret statutes. Rather, the book treats the legislative process as the center of our nation’s political and legal discourse. Readers are actively encouraged to put themselves in the place of legislators and their staff to better understand the process and the difficulties in creating legislation. Second, this book does not exclusively focus on Congress, but also uses materials from various state legislatures. Third, American Legislative Practice employs several original case studies, simulations and exercises to help put legislative decisions in context and spark class discussion.American Legislative Practice could be used in either a traditional theory-based legislation class or in a policy-related practicum or clinic. It could also be either the primary text or a supplement for a political science course focused on Congress or the legislative process.https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/books/1205/thumbnail.jp
Possibilities and Pitfalls of Health Reform Through Budget Reconciliation
No full textThe Biden administration entered office promising health reform. But the evenly-split Senate means ten Republican votes are necessary to move major legislation — cooperation that seems unlikely after years of Republican attempts to repeal and obstruct the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
Still, expanding health insurance coverage may be on the menu through budget reconciliation. A budget reconciliation bill progresses with a simple majority vote: special rules limit debate and make filibuster impossible
Unlocking Frontier Technology: The Policy Challenge of the Digital Economy
No full textFor many people, information technology has significantly helped sustain their quality of life during the pandemic. We are able to visit friends and relatives over video chat, to shop online, and to stream movies. Many people are able to work from home thanks to new technology. This should come as no surprise. Information technology has been creating new benefits for consumers, new well-paying jobs, and improved productivity growth for some time now. Large firms across the economy have been making huge investments in new information technologies that have delivered major social benefits.
These investments in software and hardware have accelerated in recent years, especially outside the tech sector. To just give a couple of examples, from 2015 to 2019, software and tech hardware investment in the waste management industry rose by 75 percent and 57 percent, respectively, as leading waste management companies built out digital platforms to deal with the increasingly complex flows of electronic and other types of waste. Over the same period, hotel chains and other accommodation companies boosted software and tech hardware investment by 71 percent and 37 percent, respectively, to manage costs and revenues. Pharmaceutical benefit managers invested in sophisticated information technology systems to handle the complex prescription and pricing policies that are at the heart of today’s drug distribution systems. And electric grid companies need complex monitoring and pricing systems to handle the new mix of renewable and non-renewable energy sources, and the flexible pricing models that come along with them.
The expectation is that these investments will eventually lead to broad gains in productivity in these industries, translating into a more prosperous society. Nevertheless, some large firm investments in technology have serious social consequences. Everyone is aware, for example, how social media platforms have helped misinformation to spread widely, misleading people about public health measures, vaccines, and political processes.
Yet, while misinformation is an important policy issue, it is not purely about digital technology — traditional media have also played an important role. Furthermore, only a few companies provide social media and there are deeper and broader problems raised by new generations of information technology.
More generally, recent economic research shows that increasing use of information technology has helped increase the dominance of large firms across the economy. This competitive advantage, in turn, has made it harder for new entrants and smaller firms, undercut innovation, exacerbated income inequality, and undermined government regulators.
These changes pose substantial challenges for policymakers. While we want to encourage firms to invest in new technology and to innovate — especially firms in those parts of the economy where productivity and use of technology has lagged — policy also needs to ensure that the knowledge of new technology and the benefits spread throughout society by opening up competition and increasing the flow of knowledge.
The problem is not “bigness” per se. Only large, complex systems can deliver these benefits, so we need large firms to innovate and invest in them. But policy can play a role in prompting or encouraging large firms to provide greater access to their technology and that can go a long way toward ameliorating the problems created by these new systems
Towards a Law and Political Economy Approach to the Global War on Terror
No full textOver the course of the global war on terror (GWOT), authors and activists have issued countless assessments of why the forever wars endure. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a great deal of legal scholarship has assumed that the cause is legal, and therefore that legal interventions, irrespective of the political power they mobilize, shape executive action. Missing from these accounts, however, is an analysis of the international political economy’s relationship to US militarism, including how it has thwarted the aspirations for self-determination of those who inhabit the countries the United States bombs. For scholarship to hold open the possibility of freedom from imperial domination, I suggest that it must interrogate the material conditions that enable the GWOT’s militarized (in)security.
In this piece, I focus on one specific case: that of Pakistan, where the United States has exploited the government’s reliance on foreign credit to guarantee cooperation in US counterinsurgency operations. In leveraging its role as a lender to provide Pakistan with short-term financial relief, the United States has deepened Pakistan’s economic dependency, undermined the nation’s chance for a more equal domestic political and economic arrangement, and consolidated the power of its domestic military elite. It is precisely that elite that has helped facilitate war in the region and thwarted economic reform. This recent history offers a template of how the United States negotiates and maintains the imperial formations necessary to its ongoing wars. As the United States escalates its war in Somalia and facilitates the country’s access to IMF loans, it may be operating from the same playbook. More research is still needed, but my hope is to invite other scholars to help elucidate the relationship between debt and militarism
Global Laboratories of Third-Party Funding Regulation
Get PDFThird-party funding, also known as dispute finance, is a controversial, dynamic, and evolving arrangement whereby an outside entity ( the funder ) finances the legal representation of a party involved in litigation or arbitration, whether domestically or internationally, on a non-recourse basis, meaning that the funder is not entitled to receive any money from the funded party if the case is unsuccessful.\u27 It has been documented in more than sixty countries on six continents worldwide-including in many of the jurisdictions highlighted in this symposium that are experimenting with other aspects of international commercial dispute resolution. Indeed, funding greases the wheels of this experimentation. The true prevalence of third-party funding is likely far greater than we know since disclosure is not presently mandated everywhere.2 This essay argues that the three biggest global regulatory issues with respect to dispute finance are disclosure, definition, and delegation of oversight and that the global laboratories of dispute finance remain firmly within the control of the private sector with the public regulators continuously struggling to understand and address new developments in the industry. An apt analogy would be that the dispute financiers are driving cars and building spaceships with respect to their innovative financing arrangements, while many of the regulators are aiming their sights at the classic horse-and-buggy third-party funding arrangements that are rapidly falling out of use
Perpetuating Inequality: What Salary History Bans Reveal About Wages
Get PDFPay gaps for women and minorities have persisted after accounting for observable differences. Why? If employers can access applicants’ salary histories while bargaining over wages, they can take advantage of past inequities, perpetuating inequality. Recently, a dozen US states have banned employer access to salary histories. We analyze the effects of these salary history bans (SHBs) on employer wage posting and pay in a difference-in-differences design. Following SHBs, employers posted wages more often and increased pay for job changers, particularly for women (6.4%) and non-whites (7.7%). Bargaining behavior appears to account for much of the persistence of residual wage gaps
Reckoning: A Dialogue about Racism, AntiRacists, and Business & Human Rights
Get PDFVideo of George Floyd\u27s death sparked global demonstrations and prompted individuals, communities and institutions to grapple with their own roles in embedding and perpetuating racist structures. The raison d\u27être of Business and Human Rights (BHR) is to tackle structural corporate impediments to the universal realization of human rights. Yet, racism, one of the most obvious of such barriers, has been a blind spot for BHR. While the field has contended with gender inequality, there have only been tokenistic nods to intersectional harms caused by business activities. The failure to address racism seriously undermines both the promise of BHR generally and specifically the recognized need to redress intersectional harms experienced by women from racialized backgrounds. In this article, three established BHR scholars enter into a dialogue on racism in BHR\u27s theory and practice. The article is not aimed at providing definitive answers, but instead at asking the questions necessary for understanding how BHR embeds, or may combat, racism. By engaging in a dialogic inquiry, the authors are able to highlight, examine, and analyze different approaches to these issues. The result is both an opening salvo on the intersection of critical race theory and BHR and an identifiable research agenda for future scholarship in the area.
The article proceeds in six substantive parts. Part I explains our choice of a dialogic methodology while Part II situates the inquiry in literature on structures of race and racism, critical race theory in law, and BHR. The dialogue begins in Part III with an interrogation of the terms racist and antiracist before Part IV contemplates whether BHR is racist, antiracist, or a tool that can be used to pursue either agenda. Because BHR is built on, and embedded with, capitalist theory, we examine capitalism\u27s racist foundations and question whether BHR can extricate itself from that origin. We then engage with the opposite end of the spectrum; what we call Black Lives Marketing, in Part V. Businesses may brand and market themselves as antiracist without ever undertaking the internal structural reforms necessary to be antiracist. We consider the demands BHR places on businesses to both adopt and to use their leverage to affect real change. The dialogue concludes in Part VI with reflections on the personal and professional impact of confronting racism within our fields of expertise. We conclude the article by noting that the dialogic methodology transformed the nature of the article, bringing a depth to our discussion that would not have been achieved otherwise
Domestic Politics and Settlement in Investor-State Arbitration
Get PDFSettlement of high-stakes investor-state disputes may expose respondent state governments to public criticism for allegedly capitulating to foreign investors and large corporations, which gives rise to domestic-audience costs in the form of lower support for respondent state governments. The anticipated domestic-audience costs may in turn constrain states’ settlement behavior. Using the time left until the next election in the respondent state as a proxy for the size of anticipated domestic-audience costs, I find evidence that the probability of settlement decreases as elections approach in respondent states. This pattern appears to hold for both democracies and nondemocracies that hold elections. The findings suggest that pressure from domestic constituents causes respondent state governments to change their settlement behavior by not settling cases they otherwise would have settled or delaying settlement. These findings reveal potential inefficiencies arising from domestic political influences on states’ settlement behavior