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From Promise to Performance: Reforming Blended Finance for Scale
Full text linkBlended finance has the potential to help close the sustainable development financing gap. Strategically combining public and philanthropic capital to unlock private investment, it has proven to be an effective tool to de-risk impact investments. But without bold, structural reform, it risks remaining a niche tool – promising in theory, underperforming in practice. Drawing on over 65 expert interviews and in-depth analysis, this report from the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment (CCSI) maps the systemic barriers preventing blended finance from operating at scale, and outlines a practical path forward. With bold leadership and coordinated reform, blended finance can become a mainstream channel for sustainable investment at scale
Pot for Profit: Cannabis Legalization, Racial Capitalism, and the Expansion of the Carceral State
No full textIt has been over a decade since the first U.S. states legalized cannabis for recreational use, and no one seems entirely satisfied with the results. Conservatives worry about rising consumption levels, adverse health effects, and cultural-moral decline. Regulators fret over unlicensed dispensaries, untested products, and marketing tactics aimed at adolescents. Meanwhile, the progressive activists who led the charge for cannabis legalization complain that it has amounted to a windfall for a small set of companies while doing little to advance social or racial justice. What went wrong
Climate Change in the Courts: A 2025 Retrospective
No full textDrawing from cases collected in the Sabin Center’s Climate Litigation Database, this report offers insights into global climate litigation developments during 2025. This third installment in our year-end series provides a snapshot of how the field of climate litigation evolved over the course of the year. The report revisits significant rulings from around the world and connects them to eight illustrative themes: (1) climate change in international courts and tribunals; (2) environmental assessment and permitting; (3) non-compliance with climate commitments; (4) constitutional and human rights; (5) greenwashing and climate-washing; (6) corporate accountability cases; (7) standing; and (8) deregulatory suits
Race, Affirmative Action, Antidiscrimination, and the Roberts Court
No full textThe Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard realizes conceptions about race and the post–Civil War amendments present in the Roberts court’s jurisprudence for several years including, notably, deep skepticism about the continuing need for civil rights remedies and a reading of colorblindness as the core purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment. Conservative litigation groups and the Trump administration are now using the SFFA decision to challenge race-conscious affirmative action programs and fundamental racial justice and civil rights laws and policies. While the Supreme Court has so far declined to adopt the farthest-reaching colorblindness arguments and has even expanded the reach of civil rights statutes in certain contexts, the next few years will likely be consequential for racial justice and antidiscrimination law. The court will almost certainly take up cases challenging the constitutionality of long-standing civil rights laws and recent racially reparative efforts
Wildfire Smoke and U.S. Law
Full text linkMany of the most wicked feedback effects of climate change relate to wildfire smoke. In some places the greenhouse gases poured into the atmosphere by wildfires exceed the reductions achieved by all efforts to fight climate change. At the same time, climate change is a major reason why wildfires are becoming more frequent and intense. Climate change and wildfires feed each other. However, environmental law and climate policy have paid relatively little attention to wildfires. The smoke from these fires — a major cause of illness and death, even thousands of miles from the blazes — is mostly unregulated. Efforts to impose liability on anyone for wildfires, except electric utilities, have gained little traction.
Part Two of this article discusses the global growth of wildfires; past trends and future projections; and the climate, health, and other impacts of wildfire smoke. Part Three traces the flip-flopping evolution of U.S. policy on extinguishing wildfires — a policy that in many ways made the problem worse. Part Four shows that the principal way to reduce wildfires is prescribed fires — the planned, small-scale setting of fires to reduce the fuel that causes much larger fires and more smoke. Part Five describes the impediments to prescribed fire, such as the implementation of certain environmental laws, relevant liability regimes, and the pattern of building housing in or near wildlands, which makes prescribed burns more difficult. Part Six discusses ways to defend against smoke. Part Seven concludes with recommendations for how the law can reduce wildfire smoke and its impacts
Understanding Processes that Produce Racial Disparities in California Death Sentences: A Review of the Literature
Full text linkA robust and extensive body of empirical research, and a rich historical record, documents a recurring and pervasive influence of race in the application of California’s death penalty. This article reviews the legal and social science research to document multiple paths through which institutions and processes produce these racial disparities over many decisions in many cases across four decades. The article reviews relevant literature by decision, institution, or actor and presents key findings. This includes documenting the history of the broad statutory design of the California capital punishment statue. The review also considers research on policing, including the influence of race on the supply of capital-eligible cases. Finally, the article collects research on racialized decision making by prosecutors, defense counsel, juries, and judges. This examination of the literature provides a necessary foundation for meaningful reform.
The California Racial Justice Act presents new statutory mechanisms to mitigate the persistent legacy of systematic racially infected decision making. This review underlines the importance of this reform and renews constitutional concerns about the breadth and application of the California statute
The Right to Grow Old
Full text linkThis chapter considers the status of a constitutional “right to grow old” under the US Constitution. Understood as a “positive” right – ensuring a certain minimum quality of life to people as they face the challenges of aging – such a right may seem unavailing given the austerity in respect to such rights that many lawyers associate with the US constitutional tradition. This chapter shows this view to be premature, at least. Unlike the kinds of positive rights overtly rejected in prior cases, such as rights to certain forms of social welfare or to racial equality, a right to grow old contemplates social support for all of us, and not simply for a politically disfavored class. Moreover, many of the conventional objections to positive rights, grounded in the difficulty of disciplining them, can be overcome or mitigated through strategies that have proven effective in many courts around the world: proportionality review, polycentric constitutionalism, a “minimum core” approach, progressive realization, and remedial flexibility
Legacy Liabilities for Oil and Gas Wells under the Mineral Leasing Act
Full text linkThe federal government is the largest landowner in the United States. The bulk of federal land is controlled by the Bureau of Land Management (“BLM”), an agency within the Department of the Interior (“DOI”) that manages more than 245 million acres or approximately 10% of the land in the United States. Below the ground, BLM’s authority reaches even further. In total, BLM controls around 700 million acres of minerals — 30% of the onshore mineral resources in the United States, spanning an area larger than Argentina. The enormous scale of oil and gas production on federal land has created a similarly enormous demand for environmental remediation. In the United States, the owners and operators of oil and gas infrastructure often have obligations “to clean up after themselves — to remove their installations at the end of their useful lives and make their abandoned sites safe.”
Over the past century, Congress and DOI have established a complex set of environmental repair laws that govern oil and gas production on federal land. While these rules primarily target the current owners of oil and gas wells, they also allow BLM to pursue the former owners and operators of these assets for unpaid environmental repair costs. However, BLM has sometimes struggled to enforce these environmental repair laws, and thousands of abandoned, ownerless, and leaking oil and gas wells pollute federal lands. In recent years, as the federal government has dedicated hundreds of millions of dollars towards cleaning up these “orphaned” wells, BLM has increasingly needed to enforce its trailing liability standards.
This report examines the laws and regulations that allow BLM to pursue the prior owners and operators of oil and gas wells on federal land for the costs of environmental repair, which the authors refer to as “legacy liabilities.” Section II provides an overview of oil and gas leasing on federal land, outlines the environmental hazards posed by idled, abandoned, and orphaned oil and gas wells, and briefly discusses the challenges well abandonment has posed to BLM. Section III outlines the statutes and regulations that create legacy liability for oil and gas well-plugging obligations, and discusses the way that BLM’s legacy liability laws have been addressed by the courts. Finally, Section IV highlights key gaps in the MLA’s legacy liability rules, and offers high-level suggestions to reform the environmental repair laws governing well-plugging on federal land
Addressing Missingness in Serialized Bureaucratic Data: The Case of Chinese Courts
Full text linkCourts around the world are putting their data online, making information about caseloads, parties, and decisions available to the public. Yet, this data is far from complete, and often only reflects a portion of courts’ dockets. We offer and validate a set of tools for leveraging serialized bureaucratic data from courts to estimate the proportion of cases available to the public and the time courts take to make decisions. Using data from more than 3,000 courts in China, our methods allow us to assess patterns of missingness in court data across provinces and cities by type of case and to conduct the largest quantitative analysis to date on court delay in China. By providing an extensive validation of both new and existing tools for estimating missingness and delay, we provide a set of recommendations for researchers looking to augment incomplete bureaucratic data around the world
American Law in a Global Context: The Basics
No full textAmerican Law in a Global Context: The Basics has long been chosen by leading law schools in the United States and across the globe for study by foreign lawyers who pursue U.S. legal education. Highly instructive for lawyers from foreign nations yet sufficiently clear and memorable for undergraduate study, American Law prepares its readers at all levels to use the case method — the dialogues between teacher and student over the law cases at the core of U.S. law study. The book features casebook-length excerpts of judicial opinions in the basic subjects of American law schools. Each case is preceded by a short, clear description of basic ideas of that subject of the law and is followed by questions and notes that help the reader grasp the case and that distinguish U.S. laws and rules from other legal systems. This much-revised edition of American Law is completely updated, with the heightened clarity required for contemporary students. It retains its comparisons to other global legal systems, focuses on easing the reader’s grasp of the basics of U.S. law and prepares those who plan to practice it. The authors apply their experiences in teaching the basics of U.S. law to thousands of students from around the world to explain points that students of all nations, including the United States, find challenging. These challenging elements of the US legal system include its Constitution, its criminal system, its juries, and its use of facts, laws, justice, and economics.https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1074/thumbnail.jp