Global Health Research Center of Central Asia
Columbia Law School Scholarship ArchiveNot a member yet
5770 research outputs found
Sort by
A Model for “Smart” Mineral Enterprise Development for Spurring Investment in Climate Change Mitigation Technology
No full textSigned in December 2015 by 194 countries, the Paris Climate Agreement laid a very encouraging foundation for global attempts to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. While this was an important step for the global community, much work remains to be done. Based on climate change and technology scenarios developed by the International Energy Agency in the wake of the agreement, the World Bank has developed a set of projections about the amount and kind of feedstock materials that will be required to achieve these targets in the years ahead. So-called “technology minerals” – including metals like lithium and cobalt that are commonly found in rechargeable batteries, or tellurium that is used to make solar cells – figure prominently. An important aspect of the Paris Agreement is the need for the world economy to shift away from fossil fuels towards green energy networks based on stored electricity and renewable energy sources. But achieving the agreement\u27s ambitious goals will necessarily require dramatic increases in global production rates for technology minerals that are far beyond current levels. Despite the urgent need for these feedstock materials, however, the mineral supply sector is not on track to satisfy anywhere near this demand. To put the industry and its supporting institutions on a path more likely to deliver these vital materials, this paper recommends a more integrated, global, system-wide approach to managing the organizations behind technology minerals: the Smart Mineral Enterprise Development (SMED) framework
Unjust Cities? Gentrification, Integration, and the Fair Housing Act
Get PDFWhat does gentrification mean for fair housing? This article considers the possibility that gentrification should be celebrated as a form of integration alongside a darker narrative that sees gentrification as necessarily unstable and leading to inequality or displacement of lower-income, predominantly of color, residents. Given evidence of both possibilities, this article considers how the Fair Housing Act might be deployed to minimize gentrification’s harms while harnessing some of the benefits that might attend integration and movement of higher-income residents to cities. Ultimately, the article urges building on the fair housing approach but employing a broader set of tools to advance a more robust form of integration. This broader framework would attend to how public and private goods are distributed in gentrifying cities, and build governance and participation mechanisms that enhance the voice and participation of traditionally excluded groups
A Time for Critique
No full textIn a world of political upheaval, rising inequality, catastrophic climate change, and widespread doubt of even the most authoritative sources of information, is there a place for critique? This book calls for a systematic reappraisal of critical thinking – its assumptions, its practices, its genealogy, its predicament – following the principle that critique can only start with self-critique.
In A Time for Critique, Didier Fassin, Bernard E. Harcourt, and a group of eminent political theorists, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, and literary and legal scholars reflect on the multiplying contexts and forms of critical discourse and on the social actors and social movements engaged in them. How can one maintain sufficient distance from the eventful present without doing it an injustice? How can one address contemporary issues without repudiating the intellectual legacies of the past? How can one avoid the disconnection between theory and action? How can critique be both public and collective? These provocative questions are addressed by revisiting the works of Foucault and Arendt, Said and Césaire, Benjamin and Du Bois, but they are also given substance through on-the-ground case studies that treat subaltern criticism in Palestine, emancipatory mobilizations in Syria, the antitorture campaigns of Sri Lankan activists, and the abolitionism of the African American critical resistance and undercommons movements in the United States. Examining lucidly the present challenges of critique, A Time for Critique shows how its theoretical reassessment and its emerging forms can illuminate the imaginative modalities to rejuvenate critical praxis.https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1269/thumbnail.jp
Private Law Statutory Interpretation
Get PDFWhile scholars routinely question the normative significance of the distinction between public law and private law, few – if any – question its conceptual basis. Put in simple terms, private law refers to bodies of legal doctrine that govern the horizontal interaction between actors, be they individuals, corporate entities, or on occasion the state acting in its private capacity. Public law on the other hand refers to doctrinal areas that deal with vertical interaction between the state and non-state actors, wherein the state exerts a direct and overbearing influence on the shape and course of the law. The latter is epitomized by the areas of constitutional law, administrative law, and criminal law, while the areas of contract law, tort law, property law, and the law of unjust enrichment exemplify the former.
Underlying this basic distinction is an important institutional dimension. Most areas that are treated as exemplifying private law are areas of the common law, meaning that they are judge made in origin. Common law rules continue to be policed and developed by courts incrementally, from within the context of individual disputes. Consequently, private law and the common law are routinely treated as synonymous and analytically coterminous with each other. While this characterization may have had few problems in simpler times, the emergence of the modern administrative state has served to render it grossly misleading in important respects.
Treating private law as subsumed entirely within the common law has produced a critical blindspot for private law thinking. It causes discussions of private law to overlook the role of the legislature in governing horizontal legal interactions. In numerous areas, statutory intervention has come to supplement and modify common law rules. Indeed, several domains of horizontal interaction between private actors are today governed entirely by statutory law. While this neglect is for the most part seen in all common law countries, in the context of the United States it has come to be further entrenched by an influential development in post-World War II legal thinking that has given it a superficial structural legitimacy. And this is the reality that under the influence of the Legal Process school of thought, the subjects of “legislation” and “statutory interpretation” have come to be understood and theorized as public law subjects. By prioritizing form over substance and thus focusing on the institutional origin of the law rather than on its substantive content, this public law approach to legislation dominates American legal thinking today. As such, it has served to turn private law’s legislative blindspot into a serious threat to the very analytical significance of private law thinking.
This Article is an attempt to describe the basis and consequences of the disconnect between private law and legislation, both for private law theorizing and legal thinking more generally. It does so by focusing on “private law statutes,” legislation (and legislative provisions) that creates or modifies rights and obligations between parties in their private capacities. Private law statutes do more than merely create private causes of action. While they create private causes, they do so on the basis of principles that are specific to the horizontal interaction between parties, rather than entirely for public-regarding policy reasons. While statutes in the areas traditionally identified as private law remain obvious examples, the category extends to altogether new domains as well
Global Settlements: Promise and Peril
Get PDFIn 2010, Morrison v. National Australia Bank Ltd. destabilized the world of securities litigation by denying those who purchased their securities outside the U.S. the ability to sue in the U.S. (as they had previously often done). Nature, however abhors a vacuum, and practitioners and other jurisdictions began to seek ways to regain access to U.S. courts. Several techniques have emerged: (1) expanding settlement classes so that they are broader than litigation classes and treating the location of the transaction as strictly a merits issue that defendants could waive; (2) adopting U.S. law as applicable to securities issued abroad by cross-listed companies (as Israel has done);(3)use of the Netherland’s WCAM statute to effect a global resolution of a settlement class; and (4) coordination between the courts in both jurisdictions in the case of a cross-listed stock. On the horizon is still a more ambitious technique: use of supplemental jurisdiction to permit a class of foreign claimants to be combined with a class of U.S. claimants. Early decisions have divided on this technique. This article suggests guidelines for courts to follow in whether to allow foreign claimants in securities actions to re-enter the U.S
The Last Refuge of Scoundrels: The Problem of Truth in a Time of Lying
Get PDFThis essay addresses the problem of truth today in light of the common belief, especially among progressives, that we have entered a post-truth age, as well as of the frequent claim that our post-truth society is the fault of postmodernists and their challenge to the objectivity of truth. The essay does not resolve the strategic question whether the post-truth argument is, as a purely tactical political matter, an effective approach to respond to the onslaught of misrepresentations and lies by President Donald Trump and the New Right. Instead, it explores the post-truth argument from a more synoptic perspective regarding the age-old questions surrounding truth and illusions
Richard Gardner: Scholar, Statesman, Columbian
Get PDFI am honored to pay tribute to Richard Gardner, who was truly one of Columbia Law School\u27s greatest global citizens. He demonstrated so many of the qualities that make Columbia Law School unique, especially the influence that Columbia Law School has on the world. He was a brilliant statesman, international lawyer, and beloved professor. Over seven decades, he was a mentor to generations of students who are now leaders in law, foreign policy, and international affairs. Upon his retirement in 2012, the Law School hosted a two-day conference in his honor. Entitled The Challenges We Face, the conference featured panels on pressing issues for the international community, including trade, finance, human rights, and challenges to the transatlantic alliance. Dick was honored by addresses from Zbigniew Brzezinski, the National Security Adviser to President Jimmy Carter, and Paul Volker, former Federal Reserve Chairman. More than 100 notable alumni came to Morningside Heights to salute him
Will Artificial Intelligence Eat the Law? The Rise of Hybrid Social-Ordering Systems
Get PDFSoftware has partially or fully displaced many former human activities, such as catching speeders or flying airplanes, and proven itself able to surpass humans in certain contests, like Chess and Jeopardy. What are the prospects for the displacement of human courts as the centerpiece of legal decision-making? Based on the case study of hate speech control on major tech platforms, particularly on Twitter and Facebook, this Essay suggests displacement of human courts remains a distant prospect, but suggests that hybrid machine – human systems are the predictable future of legal adjudication, and that there lies some hope in that combination, if done well
Aligning Investment Treaties with Sustainable Development Goals
Get PDFPolicy makers and other stakeholders are currently asking fundamental questions about whether and to what extent international investment agreements (IIAs) are consistent with and are helping to advance sustainable development objectives at home and abroad.
A 2019 paper from CCSI examines the alignment of IIAs with the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda, arguing that while FDI will play an important role in advancing development outcomes, existing treaties must be reformed and future IIAs reimagined in order to achieve deep alignment with the sustainable development goals.
The paper proposes that IIAs should be designed and evaluated with respect to their ability to promote investments that advance sustainable development goals, while withholding benefits from investments that undermine these goals.
It then argues that treaties should also be evaluated according to their ability to promote, rather than constrain, responsible, SDG-advancing governance at the national level. It considers the effects of IIAs on policy-making processes and regulatory space, cautioning that current provisions in IIAs protect the interests of investors over those of other stakeholders and constrain states’ abilities to regulate investments to conform with the public interest.
Finally, it suggests that international agreements could and should do more to address transnational governance gaps, regulatory races to the bottom, and global commons problems, where international commitments related to the governance of investment could advance development outcomes
Agricultural Investments: A Primer for Host Government Lawyers and Local Lawyers in Private Practice
Get PDFAttracting investment in agriculture has been a key policy goal of governments in the global south. Development partners have supported these policies. But what do governments hope to achieve by attracting investment in the agricultural sector? Why are companies interested in investing? What is in it for local communities? And what is the role of lawyers? This primer provides an introduction to some of the key issues that arise in the negotiation of contracts linked to investments in agriculture, and practical guidance for how to approach common issues. Section 1 of this primer outlines the typical goals of three important stakeholders – the government, companies, and communities who live on or near land on which a project will take place – along with the risks that each type of stakeholder faces. Section 2 discusses the role of contracts and lawyers, provides tips for negotiations, and includes resources for further reading