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Trade Integration in Turbulent Times
Get PDFThe WTO has been going through an existential crisis, from which it is like that it will not exit unscathed. If it is to remain an organization of universal membership, it will have to content itself to shallow integration. Its continuing policy relevance, will largely depend on the choices it will make about the nature of its own integration process. The good news is that no one can simply walk away from globalization. The downside (for the WTO) is that globalization is being increasingly administered through bilateral contracts
DTP 01
No full textPhoto of Jedediah S. Purdy, William S. Beinecke Professor of Law at Columbia Law School.https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/defending_the_planet_podcast/1006/thumbnail.jp
DTP 03
No full textPhoto of Laurence Tubiana, CEO of the European Climate Foundation (ECP).https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/defending_the_planet_podcast/1011/thumbnail.jp
BU S2E02
No full textLine art image of Joshua Mitts, Associate Professor of Law at Columbia Law School.https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/beyond_unprecedented_podcast/1023/thumbnail.jp
Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States Final Report
Get PDFOn April 9, 2021, President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. issued Executive Order 14023 establishing this Commission, to consist of “individuals having experience with and knowledge of the Federal judiciary and the Supreme Court of the United States.” The Order charged the Commission with producing a report for the President that addresses three sets of questions. First, the Report should include “[a]n account of the contemporary commentary and debate about the role and operation of the Supreme Court in our constitutional system and about the functioning of the constitutional process by which the President nominates and, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, appoints Justices to the Supreme Court.” Second, the Report should consider the “historical background of other periods in the Nation’s history when the Supreme Court’s role and the nominations and advice-and-consent process were subject to critical assessment and prompted proposals for reform.” Third, the Report should provide an analysis of the principal arguments for and against particular proposals to reform the Supreme Court, “including an appraisal of [their] merits and legality,” and should be informed by “a broad spectrum of ideas.”
The Report begins by explaining the genesis of today’s Court reform debate, including by identifying developments that gave rise to President Biden’s decision to issue the April 2021 Executive Order, particularly the debates surrounding the most recent nominations. This Introduction emphasizes that the Court’s composition and jurisprudence long have been subjects of public controversy and debate in the nation’s civic life: The Court serves as a crucial guardian of the rule of law and also plays a central role in major social and political conflicts. Its decisions have profound effects on the life of the nation. Though conflict surrounding the processes by which the President nominates and the Senate confirms Justices is not new, it has become more intensely partisan in recent years.
The Introduction also articulates three common and interrelated ideas frequently invoked in reform debates and throughout the Chapters of the Report: the importance of protecting or enhancing the Court’s legitimacy; the role of judicial independence in our system of government; and the value of democracy and its relationship to the Supreme Court’s decisionmaking. These important ideas can mean different things to different people. The Introduction discusses the range of meanings ascribed to these terms, with the aim of clarifying how they are deployed in arguments for and against reform
DTP 04
No full textPhoto of Michael Burger \u2703.https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/defending_the_planet_podcast/1014/thumbnail.jp
A Practical Proactive Proposal for Dealing with Attrition: Alternative Approaches and an Empirical Example
Get PDFSurvey nonresponse and attrition undermine the validity of many and possibly most econometric estimates. We propose that survey administrators and evaluators proactively create an instrument for observation, for example, by ex ante randomizing participants to differing intensity of follow-up. We illustrate how to apply our proposed methodology using a carefully conducted randomized controlled trial, the Moving to Opportunity demonstration project, which de facto randomly assigned a subset of subjects to more intensive follow-up. The approach yields treatment effect estimates similar to the unbiased estimator based on complete administrative data and has narrower confidence intervals than alternative bounding approaches
Should the European Union Fix, Leave or Kill the Energy Charter Treaty?
Get PDFIn the early 1990s, the European Economic Community – the predecessor of the European Union (EU) – spearheaded an initiative to promote international cooperation in the energy sector, particularly with post-Soviet States in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Out of this process the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) was born in 1994. Going much beyond international cooperation, the treaty allows foreign investors in the energy sector to sue their host States in international arbitral tribunals and claim monetary compensation when policy measures and other State action affect their interests.
Fast-forward to 2021. With 135 known cases initiated to date, the ECT’s is the most frequently invoked treaty-based investor-State dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism. As evidenced by a growing body of research, the ECT is obsolete considering not only modern tenets of international investment law, but also the objectives of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), both global texts 21 years younger. The special protections under international law that the ECT gives to fossil fuel investors and their investments go in the opposite direction of what is needed for the world to decarbonize its energy matrix and fight the climate emergency
Re-Reading \u3cem\u3eChevron\u3c/em\u3e
Get PDFThough increasingly disfavored by the Supreme Court, Chevron remains central to administrative law doctrine. This Article suggests a way for the Court to reformulate the Chevron doctrine without overruling the Chevron decision. Through careful attention to the language of Chevron itself, the Court can honor the decision’s underlying value of harnessing comparative institutional advantage in judicial review, while setting aside a highly selective reading that unduly narrows judicial review. This re-reading would put the Chevron doctrine – and with it, an entire branch of administrative law – on firmer footing
A Perfectly Empty Gift
Get PDF“Almost citizens.” What does that even mean? It’s like being “kind of pregnant,” isn’t it? In other words, nonsense. Citizenship isn’t an “almost” kind of thing. It’s all or nothing. Unless, I suppose, the word “almost” is used in a simple temporal sense – as in, “Our naturalization ceremony is tomorrow. We’re almost citizens! Yay!” There, the phrase “almost citizens” makes sense. Otherwise not. Right?
Wrong. “Almost citizens,” in a sense as ambiguous as it sounds, is what Almost Citizens: Puerto Rico, the U S Constitution, and Empire is about. “Almost citizens” describes what Puerto Ricans were from 1898, when the United States annexed the island, until 1917, when Congress collectively naturalized its people by statute. “Almost citizens,” in a different but equally ambiguous sense, captures what the people of Puerto Rico somehow remained even after they became U.S. citizens in 1917. And “almost citizens” arguably defines what they still are today