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Legal Scholars File Brief in Case in Which the Department of Justice Rejects Religious Liberty Rights of Non-Profit That Provides Safe Space to Injection Drug Users
Get PDFNationally recognized law professors with expertise in religious liberty law filed an amicus brief in a case in which the U.S. Justice Department is seeking to shut down safe-injection sites. The case focuses on the work of a Philadelphia-based nonprofit, Safehouse, a faith-based non-profit that provides people who inject drugs with sterile equipment to minimize the spread of blood-borne illnesses, and to support harm reduction for persons who use injectable drugs
Trial Monitoring of People v. Miti et al. (Zambia 2018)
Get PDFBetween September and December 2018, TrialWatch monitored the trial of sixactivists in Zambia, who were arrested and charged under the Public Order Act inconnection with an anti-corruption protest they organized in 2017. On December 21, 2018, the judge dismissed the charges and acquitted all six defendants.
Although the trial itself was generally fair, and Judge Mwaka Chigali Mikalile is to be commended in this regard, the proceedings were infected with prosecutorial misconduct in pursuing spurious charges based upon patently insufficient evidence
Submission to the United Nations Universal Periodic Review of Yemen
Get PDFMwatana for Human Rights (Mwatana), the Columbia Law School Human Rights Clinic (the clinic), Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS), International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), and the Gulf Centre for Human Rights (GCHR) submit this report to inform the examination of Yemen during its third Universal Periodic Review (UPR). This submission focuses on international human rights and humanitarian law violations by the Government of Yemen and by the armed group Ansar Allah (the Houthis)
Standing Rock Defendants Move to Dismiss on Basis of Factual Disputes
Get PDFNew York, February 15, 2019. Today, state and county defendants in Thunderhawk v. County of Morton et al. filed motions to dismiss plaintiffs’ First Amended Complaint. In their court filings, defendants attach 160 exhibits contesting the peaceful nature of the NoDAPL movement, arguing that their discriminatory closure of Highway 1806 was factually justified. Defendants ask the United States District Court to accept their factual account of the NoDAPL movement over the plaintiffs’
Richard N. Gardner (1927–2019)
Get PDFRichard Gardner occupies a unique place in the history of United States diplomacy, in the teaching and practice of international law, in scholarship across a wide range of fields of interest to our discipline, and in the life of this Society. He was my valued colleague and mentor at Columbia University for many years, not just at the Law School, but also at the School of International and Public Affairs, where he nurtured and inspired generations of diplomats and policy experts to follow the call of public service. Having ascended the academic ladder to ever more dazzling heights — from Harvard (B.A.), to Yale (J.D. 1951), to Oxford (Rhodes Scholar and D. Phil. 1954) — he began teaching international law at Columbia in 1955, where he remained for six decades, through and beyond his retirement from teaching in 2012. He was the Henry L. Moses Professor of Law and International Organization at Columbia, teaching international law and a legendary seminar, “Legal Aspects of U.S. Foreign Economic Policy.
Minds, Machines, and the Law: The Case of Volition in Copyright Law
Get PDFThe increasing prevalence of ever-sophisticated technology permits machines to stand in for or augment humans in a growing number of contexts. The questions of whether, when, and how the so-called actions of machines can and should result in legal liability thus will also become more practically pressing. One important set of questions that the law will inevitably need to confront is whether machines can have mental states, or — at least — something sufficiently like mental states for the purposes of the law. This is because a number of areas of law have explicit or implicit mental state requirements for the incurrence of legal liability. Thus, in these contexts, whether machines can incur legal liability turns on whether a machine can operate with the requisite mental state. Consider the example of copyright law. Given the long history of mechanical copying, courts have already faced the question of whether a machine making a copy can have the mental states required for liability. They have often answered with a resounding, unconditional “no.” But this Essay seeks to challenge any generalization that machines cannot operate with a mental state in the eyes of the law. Taking lessons from philosophical thinking about minds and machines — in particular, the conceptual distinction between “conscious” and “functional” properties of the mind—this Essay uses copyright’s volitional act requirement as a case study to demonstrate that certain legal mental state requirements might seek to track only the functional properties of the states in question, even ones which can be possessed by machines. This Essay concludes by considering how to move toward a more general framework for evaluating the question of machine mental states for legal purposes
Explanation \u3c Justification: GDPR and the Perils of Privacy
Get PDFThe European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the most comprehensive legislation yet enacted to govern algorithmic decision-making. Its reception has been dominated by a debate about whether it contains an individual right to an explanation of algorithmic decision-making. We argue that this debate is misguided in both the concepts it invokes and in its broader vision of accountability in modern democracies. It is justification that should guide approaches to governing algorithmic decision-making, not simply explanation. The form of justification – who is justifying what to whom – should determine the appropriate form of explanation. This suggests a sharper focus on systemic accountability, rather than technical explanations of models to isolated, rights-bearing individuals. We argue that the debate about the governance of algorithmic decision-making is hampered by its excessive focus on privacy. Moving beyond the privacy frame allows us to focus on institutions rather than individuals and on decision-making systems rather than the inner workings of algorithms. Future regulatory provisions should develop mechanisms within modern democracies to secure systemic accountability over time in the governance of algorithmic decision-making systems.
This paper examines those provisions. We explore the tools the GDPR provides for ensuring that institutions justify their use of algorithmic decision-making systems, to both regulators and individuals subject to their decisions. Our aim is not simply to interpret the GDPR, though we side with scholars who argue that the main text of the GDPR must be read in conjunction with surrounding ‘soft-law’, including the Recitals, Article 29 Working Party (A29WP) guidance, and the interpretations of authorities mandated with enforcing its provisions.1 Rather, our aim is to step back and examine the concepts that underpin the right to explanation debate, and the broader challenge of regulating algorithmic decision-making
Symposium: The Future of the New International Tax Regime
Get PDFThe symposium was held at Fordham University School of Law on October 26, 2018. It has been edited to remove minor cadences of speech that appear awkward in writing and to provide sources and references to other explanatory materials in respect to certain statements made by the speakers
Changes in Patterns of Mortality Rates and Years of Life Lost Due to Firearms in the United States, 1999 to 2016: A Joinpoint Analysis
Get PDFFirearm-related death rates and years of potential life lost (YPLL) vary widely between population subgroups and states. However, changes or inflections in temporal trends within subgroups and states are not fully documented. We assessed temporal patterns and inflections in the rates of firearm deaths and %YPLL due to firearms for overall and by sex, age, race/ethnicity, intent, and states in the United States between 1999 and 2016.
We extracted age-adjusted firearm mortality and YPLL rates per 100,000, and %YPLL from 1999 to 2016 by using the WONDER (Wide-ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research) database. We used Joinpoint Regression to assess temporal trends, the inflection points, and annual percentage change (APC) from 1999 to 2016.
National firearm mortality rates were 10.3 and 11.8 per 100,000 in 1999 and 2016, with two distinct segments; a plateau until 2014 followed by an increase of APC = 7.2% (95% CI 3.1, 11.4). YPLL rates were from 304.7 and 338.2 in 1999 and 2016 with a steady APC increase in %YPLL of 0.65% (95% CI 0.43, 0.87) from 1999 to an inflection point in 2014, followed by a larger APC in %YPLL of 5.1% (95% CI 0.1, 10.4). The upward trend in firearm mortality and YPLL rates starting in 2014 was observed in subgroups of male, non-Hispanic blacks, Hispanic whites and for firearm assaults. The inflection points for firearm mortality and YPLL rates also varied across states.
Within the United States, firearm mortality rates and YPLL remained constant between 1999 and 2014 and has been increasing subsequently. There was, however, an increase in firearm mortality rates in several subgroups and individual states earlier than 2014
Corruption in Basketball: Understanding \u3cem\u3eUnited States v James Gatto et. al.\u3c/em\u3e
Get PDFIn United States v. James Gatto et. al., federal prosecutors successfully argued that violations of rules adopted by private associations can form the basis for federal criminal prosecution. The convictions in the Gatto case established that rules promulgated by the National College Athletic Association, the NCAA, could serve as the basis for felony charges of, among others, wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The Gatto trial was part of a much larger investigation by the FBI into NCAA sports corruption. This paper will look at the NCAA investigation with a focus on James Gatto and his associates, the Gatto trial and conviction, and the potential ramifications of the legal theory successfully deployed by SDNY prosecutors in the Gatto trial