Global Health Research Center of Central Asia
Columbia Law School Scholarship ArchiveNot a member yet
5770 research outputs found
Sort by
Comments to HUD Re: FR-6111-P-02, HUD’s Implementation of the Fair Housing Act’s Disparate Impact Standard
Get PDFIn key places, HUD’s 2019 proposed Implementation of the Fair Housing Act’s Disparate Impact Standard is at odds with express provisions of the Fair Housing Act (FHA) and goes so far as to invent new defenses to liability for housing discrimination and to place the burden of pleading and proving the nonexistence of some of these defenses on plaintiffs. In addition, the proposed rule addresses itself to matters beyond the FHA; specifically, to evidentiary and procedural issues as they may arise in cases brought under the FHA in federal or state courts. HUD provides no reasoned justification for these changes in its regulations, and by creating additional obstacles to achieving Congress’s purposes in enacting the FHA, HUD risks violating its statutory duty to further fair housing. These Comments, submitted by Professors Olatunde Johnson (Columbia Law School), Mark C. Niles (Hofstra University, Deane School of Law), Rigel C. Oliveri (University of Missouri School of Law), and Lauren E. Willis (Loyola Law School Los Angeles), explain why key parts of the proposed rule must not be adopted
Ask for More: 10 Questions to Negotiate Anything
No full textNegotiation is not a zero-sum game. It’s an essential skill for your career that can also improve your closest relationships and your everyday life, but often people shy away from it, feeling defeated before they’ve even started. In this groundbreaking new book on negotiation, Ask for More, Alexandra Carter – Columbia law professor and mediation expert who has helped students, business professionals, the United Nations, and more – offers a straightforward, accessible approach anyone can use to ask for and get more.
We’ve been taught incorrectly that the loudest and most assertive voice prevails in any negotiation, or otherwise both sides compromise, ending up with less. Instead Carter shows that you get far more value by asking the right questions of the person you’re negotiating with than you do from arguing with them. She offers a simple yet powerful ten-question framework for successful negotiation where both sides emerge victorious. Carter’s proven method extends far beyond one “yes” and instead creates value that lasts a lifetime.
Ask for More gives you the tools to bring clarity and perspective to any important discussion, no matter the topic.https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1248/thumbnail.jp
Profiling and Consent: Stops, Searches, and Seizures after \u3ci\u3eSoto\u3c/i\u3e
Get PDFFollowing Soto v. State (1999), New Jersey was the first state to enter into a Consent Decree with the U.S. Department of Justice to end racially selective enforcement on the state’s highways. The Consent Decree led to extensive reforms in the training and supervision of state police troopers, and the design of information technology to monitor the activities of the State Police. Compliance was assessed in part on the State’s progress toward the elimination of racial disparities in the patterns of highway stops and searches. We assess compliance by analyzing data on 257,000 vehicle stops on the New Jersey Turnpike by the state police from 2005–2007, the final months of the Consent Decree. Specifically, we exploit heterogeneity of officer and driver race to identify disparities in the probability that stops lead to a search. We assume a crime-minimizing or welfarist rationale for stops, under which race-neutral factors are equally likely to motivate stops, regardless of driver or passenger race. We also test a Fairness Presumption by comparing search patterns between driver-officer pairs where the driver and officer are different races, and a set of race-neutral benchmarks where the driver and officer are the same race. Results of fixed effects logistic regressions show that Black and Hispanic drivers, when stopped, are more than twice as likely as White drivers to be searched, regardless of officer race. The results also suggest that search patterns vary significantly by officer race: Black officers are less likely to conduct a search in the course of a stop than are White drivers. We also see significant interactions between the race of officers and that of the drivers they stop: Black drivers are significantly more likely to be searched by White officers than they are by Black officers; on the other hand, Hispanic drivers are significantly less likely to be searched by either Black or White officers than they are by Hispanic officers. Racial disparities in the selection of stopped drivers for search and in the rates of seizure of contraband suggest that despite institution-al reforms under the Consent Decree in management and professionalization of patrol officers, there were no tangible gains in distributional equity. We review the design of the Consent Decree and the accompanying oversight mechanisms to identify structural weaknesses in external monitoring and institutional design in the oversight of the State Police that compromised the pursuit of equality goals
Enhancing Efficiency at Nonprofits with Analysis and Disclosure
Get PDFThe U.S. nonprofit sector spends $2.54 trillion each year. If the sector were a country, it would have the eighth largest economy in the world, ahead of Brazil, Italy, Canada, and Russia. The government provides nonprofits with billions in tax subsidies, but instead of evaluating the quality of their work, it leaves this responsibility to nonprofit managers, boards, and donors. The best nonprofits are laboratories of innovation, but unfortunately some are stagnant backwaters, which waste money on out-of-date missions and inefficient programs. To promote more innovation and less stagnation, this Article makes two contributions to the literature.
First, this Article breaks new ground in identifying sources of inefficiency at nonprofits. The literature focuses on incentives, arguing that managers and board members are less motivated to run a nonprofit efficiently because they cannot keep its profits. In response, this Article emphasizes that the problem is not just motivation, but also information. Measuring success is harder at nonprofits. Instead of tracking profitability, they use metrics that are less reliable and harder to measure. These measurement challenges complicate the efforts even of dedicated and competent managers to operate efficiently. While this information problem is familiar, another has been largely overlooked in the literature: When success is hard to measure, incompetence and self-interested practices are less visible, and thus are harder to stop. For example, if managers regularly overpay vendors, the consequence at a for-profit firm (lower profits) is easier to observe than at a nonprofit (less effective service for beneficiaries).
Second, this Article recommends a response to this underappreciated source of inefficiency: better analysis and disclosure as a strategy for organizational change. In principle, nonprofits are supposed to maximize social return, but how can they operationalize this abstract principle? To help them do so, this Article recommends three questions that nonprofits should answer every year: first, how important are the challenges the nonprofit is trying to address?; second, how effective are the nonprofit’s responses to these challenges?; and third, is the nonprofit the right organization to respond to these challenges? These questions press nonprofit managers and boards to be more explicit about priorities, monitor progress, improve and expand high-value programs, and fix or shut down ineffective ones. This Article also recommends that nonprofits should disclose this analysis to the public, even though current law does not require them to do so. This disclosure would empower donors and rating agencies to be more effective monitors. It also would help donors make better informed philanthropic choices and would enable charities to borrow innovative ideas from each other more easily
Making Coffee Sustainable
No full textCoffee is the world’s favorite drink, with more than 400 billion cups enjoyed per year. We do our part to add to that grand total! Coffee drinkers around the world love their coffee – and appreciate it, even more, when they know that their coffee is grown sustainably
Electric Utility Alignment with the SDGs & the Paris Climate Agreement
Get PDFThe 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda poses a unique and critical challenge to the energy sector: how to scale access to clean energy to power sustainable, economic development for a growing population, while simultaneously decarbonizing global energy supply. Expanding access to clean energy will play a crucial role in achieving nearly every one of the Sustainable Development Goals, including those related to agricultural production, health outcomes, educational performance, water systems, access to infrastructure, and reducing inequalities. However, practices by some actors in the energy sector, and continued over-reliance on greenhouse gas-intensive fossil fuels also undermine global efforts to mitigate climate change and maintain healthy ecosystems and populations, and can exacerbate global conflict and inequality.
In recent years, a number of frameworks and standards have been created, to evaluate energy companies’ alignment to the SDGs and to help companies and investors improve performance and decision-making. While such initiatives are surely a step in the right direction, to date, many of these tools fail to account holistically for the ways that energy sector conduct could impact sustainable development, and how those impacts map onto each of the 17 SDGs. This failing has allowed companies to “cherry pick” their preferred reporting criteria while ignoring less convenient SDGs. Further, the lack of consensus around standards and evaluation metrics for SDG-aligned practice has led to broadly different conclusions about the same companies’ conduct, undercutting confidence in the utility of evaluation frameworks altogether.
In order to assist both the energy and financial sectors in their alignment with the SDGs, CCSI and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network developed a conceptual framework to define SDG-aligned business practices in the energy sector, and in particular the utility sector.
The conceptual framework, composed of four pillars and applied to the utility sector, is as follows: Product: Is the utility a leader in zero-carbon electricity generation and is the utility on the path to reach zero carbon emissions by 2050 or earlier? Production process: Is the utility’s production process socially and environmentally sustainable? Value chain responsibility: Is the utility’s supply and value chain aligned with the SDGs and PCA? Citizenship: Is the utility a good corporate citizen?
The full report adapts the four pillar framework to the utility sector, evaluates the proposed framework against twelve existing sustainability initiatives, and compares the performance of the ten largest utilities in Europe and the United States, by market capitalization. The report also provides recommendations for next steps.
The project aims at bringing coherence and rigor to SDG measurement, reporting, and tools, supporting engagement with the sector on responsible practices and enabling highly responsible SDG-oriented companies to set themselves apart from the rest
Submission to Bonsucro re Production Standard v5 (2019-21)
Get PDFIn July 2020, CCSI made a formal submission to Bonsucro, an international multi-stakeholder initiative and certification scheme concerned with promoting sustainable sugar cane production. The submission formed part of consultations for Bonsucro’s draft Production Standard version 5. CCSI’s submission focused on challenges associated with implementing, and auditing for compliance with, three aspects of Bonsucro’s draft standard, namely: Obtaining the free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) of Indigenous and traditional communities when establishing or expanding sugar production operations Implementing transparent and participatory processes to assess, monitor, and evaluate the environmental and social impacts of new and existing projects; and Establishing accessible dispute resolution and grievance mechanisms that allow communities to raise and resolve problems.
The submission proposed a concrete solution to complement Bonsucro operators’ efforts to more effectively meet that Standard in practice: a Basket Fund for Responsible Investment.
A Basket Fund for Responsible Investment refers to an independently administered fund that receives financial contributions from multiple sources and then makes grants to pay for technical support – from civil society organizations, paralegals, organizers, non-legal experts, and lawyers, among others – for investment-affected communities. Financial contributors would include Bonsucro operators whose revenues exceed a certain threshold, potentially alongside such operators’ financiers, investors, large-scale suppliers, and customers, among others. By diversifying its sources of funding, a Basket Fund can achieve greater independence of community support, minimizing the risk of actual or perceived undue influence over the community or its support providers.
The submission also noted that facilitating affected communities’ access to technical support through a Basket Fund would also benefit private sector organizations, given that a lack of community support increases the risk of grievances and conflict, which can result in material costs for companies and their investors
WTO Dispute Settlement and the Appellate Body Crisis: Insider Perceptions and Members’ Revealed Preferences
Get PDFThe WTO dispute settlement system is in crisis, following the decision of the United States to block new appointments to the Appellate Body (AB). The AB went into hibernation in December 2019, not having enough sitting members to be able to operate. What do WTO members think of the performance of WTO dispute settlement? How much do WTO members care about the existence and operation of an appeals mechanism? In this article, we report on the results of a survey of WTO Members’ perceptions of the AB and the role it plays (should play). We complement this with data on Members’ revealed preferences in their use of the dispute settlement system, their intervention in WTO debates on the AB crisis and their responses to demise of the AB. The data reveal strong support for the basic design of the dispute settlement system but also that the United States is not alone in perceiving that the AB went beyond its mandate. There are substantive questions that need to be addressed if the Appellate Body impasse is to be resolved
Climate Reregulation in a Biden Administration
Get PDFOn January 20, 2017, Inauguration Day, the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School launched the Climate Deregulation Tracker, the first of what would become numerous online trackers, news reports, academic analyses, and other resources designed to spotlight the Trump administration’s use and abuse of executive authority to pursue its agenda to cut back on government regulations and to promote the extraction and use of fossil fuels. The Climate Deregulation Tracker has had a relatively narrow purpose: to keep tabs on the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the federal government’s climate-related regulations and policies and help inform members of the public so they more effectively voice their views on deregulation. In the almost four years since its launch, the Tracker has logged 159 executive branch actions that fit the bill. President Trump’s actions have frequently taken the form of executive orders that describe national policies, such as prioritizing fossil fuel production and distribution, emphasizing economic uses of natural resources, expediting federal environmental reviews for infrastructure projects, and decreasing emissions and efficiency standards across the board. The President’s executive orders have resulted in numerous agency actions designed to achieve outcomes consistent with the orders’ stated policies. Examples include rules delaying, rescinding, and replacing greenhouse gas emissions standards for power plants, automobiles, oil and gas operations and landfills, and the revocation of policies and guidance that incorporate climate impacts into federal permitting, investment and other decision making
Climate Change, Coming Soon to a Court Near You – Report Two: Climate Litigation in Asia and the Pacific and Beyond
Get PDFClimate change in Asia and the Pacific is deadly and impacts communities now. Regional climate litigation seeks relief in increasingly urgent ways and judges need a tool kit to respond. Report Two of this four-part series is a comprehensive review of the growing number and variety of climate lawsuits in Asia and the Pacific. It underscores the unique flavor and voice of regional jurisprudence and compares it with global approaches. No one can solve climate change alone and neither can any particular judiciary. Judges can, however, learn from each other, taking judicial excellence and applying it to the case before them