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The Perils of Relying on FEMA Flood Maps in Real Estate Transactions
Get PDFA standard part of due diligence before real estate transactions is ascertaining whether the property is prone to flooding. The usual method has long been to rely on the 100-yearold flood maps of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
Such reliance is highly misleading. FEMA flood maps can be seriously out of date. They also reflect only historic conditions, not future flooding as a result of sea level rise and extreme precipitation. Moreover, large parts of the United States are not mapped at all
All Faiths & None: A Guide to Protecting Religious Liberty for Everyone
Get PDFReligious liberty rights have been immeasurably damaged over the past several years — often in the name of protecting religious liberty.
Government officials have embraced Islamophobic policies and rhetoric; shut the door on refugees fleeing religious persecution; elevated the religious rights of their political allies over the rights — religious and otherwise — of other communities; used religion as a tool of economic deregulation; and denigrated the beliefs of religious minorities, atheists, and religious progressives.
To achieve true freedom for those of all faiths and none, a complete overhaul of religious liberty policy, and a new understanding of what this right truly means, is necessary. This report offers guidance on how a future presidential administration could protect religious freedom — not merely for a favored few, but for everyone. While we discuss specific policy measures necessary to protect religious liberty, the report is organized around a set of overarching principles in order to provide more holistic guidance about the true meaning of religious freedom
AFFH and the Challenge of Reparations in the Administrative State
Get PDFAmerica’s summer of racial reckoning has led to increased attention on proposals to provide reparations to Black Americans.
Reparations discussions typically concern securing compensation for slavery. The racial harm caused by the administrative state is generally less of a focus, even though racial exclusions and discrimination in 20th-century administrative programs helped shape contemporary disparities in housing, wealth, and opportunity that endure today. A provision of federal housing law provides a window into the roots of racial harm enacted through administrative state programs, as well as the limits of administrative law as a tool for repairing this harm
Direct Air Capture: An Emerging Necessity to Fight Climate Change
Get PDFThe Paris Agreement of 2015 declared that we must keep global average temperatures well below 2.0°C (3.6°F) above preindustrial levels, and as close to 1.5°C as possible. However, a 2018 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) showed that even 2.0°C would be catastrophic; 1.5°C should be the firm goal. We are now around 1.0°C and are already seeing wildfires, hurricanes, inland precipitation, and other events of unprecedented magnitude
Alston and Heyns on Unlawful Killings: A Compendium of the Jurisprudence of the United Nations Special Rapporteurs on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions from 2004-2016
Get PDFThis book provides a detailed overview of the law and policy related to unlawful killings and the right to life. It is organized into the key thematic issues and types of killings that arose during the mandate of the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions between 2004-2016. Each chapter contains an introductory overview and selected extracts from UN Special Rapporteur reports to the United Nations General Assembly and the Human Rights Council and other normative work, and covers the applicable international law, policy considerations, and common fact scenarios.
Philip Alston held the mandate of United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions between 2004 and 2010; Christof Heyns did so from 2010 to 2016. This book was created to provide easy access to the work of the Special Rapporteurs, and to be a useful guide for those studying and working to promote respect for human rights. The book was edited by the two rapporteurs, together with their main advisors during their tenure as mandate holders, Sarah Knuckey and Thomas Probert.https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1381/thumbnail.jp
The Integrative Effects of Global Legal Pluralism
Get PDFInternational lawyers widely understand that legal pluralism is a fact of global life and that it can, in certain settings, be desirable. But many still approach it with some trepidation. A prominent skeptical claim is that pluralist structures lack the integrative resources that unify people around a shared governance project. This claim has been prominent with respect to two kinds of conflicts that are routine in international law: (1) conflicts that play out within a single international legal arrangement, and (2) conflicts that cut across multiple legal arrangements. For both, the skeptical claim is directed at the pluralist structure itself. The stated problem — the thing that is thought to disintegrate the association—is that competing legal positions are not reconciled or resolved but allowed to coexist, fester, and repeatedly reappear.
This chapter uses the historic experience of the World Trade Organization to challenge that claim. Although other scholars have already argued that the claim is overdrawn, Professor Hakimi contests its central premise. She argues that ineradicable governance conflicts are not necessarily dissociative for a political community—meaning the group of people who partake in a given governance project. Creating space for people to have these conflicts in relatively constructive ways can instead be productive for the group. It is a way for them to participate together and invest in the joint enterprise, despite their many disagreements, and thus to preserve the enterprise as a going concern that binds them
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Get PDFExamines the “counter-” move in Balibar’s thought, analysing it not in the Kantian or Hegelian sense of a synthesis that resolves an antinomic opposition (not the least of which, because the particle “contre-” functions differently than the particle “anti-”), but rather as an original counterpoint that itself becomes so powerful as to liberate itself from the oppositional relationship and transform itself into a free-standing concept, intervention, or even mode of governmentality. It is not an opposition that leads to a synthesis, but instead to a stage of “perfection” that (1) merely indexes its former counter-partner, and (2) becomes a fully independent concept, all to itself, that does not incorporate its opposition and is no longer a reaction against anything
Legislatures, Executives and Political Control of Government
Get PDFThis chapter examines how political control over government is exercised today in the UK, the US, and France, focusing on control of the executive branch by the legislature and control of the administrative executive by the political executive. These three jurisdictions were chosen because they are paradigmatic examples of different political regimes: parliamentarism, separation of powers presidentialism, and semi-presidentialism. In theory, these different institutional structures should affect how political control is understood and wielded. In the traditional Westminster parliamentary model, for example, the government is formed from the leadership of the majority party in Parliament and it is the government that controls policy-making. By contrast, the traditional account of a separation of powers regime posits a separate legislature and executive as institutional rivals. Semi-presidential regimes combine a popularly elected presidential-type executive with a legislatively-dependent cabinet executive
Revising Boilerplate: A Comparison of Private and Public Company Transactions
Get PDFThe textbook model of commercial contracts between sophisticated parties holds that terms are proposed, negotiated and ultimately priced by the parties. Parties reach agreement on contract provisions that best suit their transaction with the goal of maximizing the joint surplus from the contract. The reality, of course, is that the majority of the provisions in contemporary commercial contracts are boilerplate terms derived from prior transactions and even the most sophisticated contracting parties pay little attention to these standard terms, focusing instead on the price of the transaction. With standard-form or boilerplate contracts, this dynamic of replicating by rote the terms from prior transactions is exacerbated when the contract terms are reproduced largely because the same term was successful in closing prior deals and, even more importantly, because the terms are part of the market standard. The end result is that suboptimal Here, courts may be practically incapable of recovering a plausible meaning that was attached to the standard terms by the contracting parties at the time the contract was drafted
A Better Financing System? The Death and Possible Rebirth of the Presidential Nomination Public Financing Program
Get PDFIn the spring of 1974, the 31-year-old junior Senator from Delaware, Joseph R. Biden, Jr., published a law review article in which he decried the traditional system of privately financed election campaigns. Private financing, Senator Biden contended, “affords certain wealthy individuals or special interest groups the potential for exerting a disproportionate influence over both the electoral mechanism and the policy-making processes of the government.” Moreover, Biden urged, private funding poses an obstacle to the candidacies of “individuals of moderate means” and so was at odds with the “concept of American democracy [that] presumes that all citizens, regardless of access to wealth, have equal access to the political process.” In addition, he argued that private funding favored incumbents. To address the “Political Darwinism” of private financing, Biden called on Congress to adopt a system of public funding for all federal candidates