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The Rise and Fall of a Reproductive Right: \u3cem\u3eDobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization\u3c/em\u3e
Get PDFAlthough the phrase “Post-Roe Era” is still used by those who want to underscore the loss wrought last June by Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, it is only a matter of time before the present state of reproductive constitutionalism solidifies into the more authoritarian “Dobbs Era.” In these early days of transition, states are still figuring out what they want the legal status of abortion to be, ever since Dobbs overruled both Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, thus tossing the issue of abortion’s legality back to the states for resolution. In Justice Alito’s words, “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”
So, should what was formerly regarded as a legal medical procedure remain so? Should it be legal and funded? Or should legal abortion migrate from a state’s health regulations to the criminal code and be illegal? Or illegal with exceptions? Or illegal with extraterritorial reach? And who should bear the burden of the illegality? Pregnant women, their physicians, and anyone who aids or assists them
Lawyerless Law Development
Get PDFState civil courts are the object of growing scholarly attention converging from two directions: rapidly expanding research regarding lawyerless state civil trial courts, and an increasing volume of voices calling for state supreme courts to serve as a balm for American democracy’s wounds. The challenges of lawyerless trial courts and the potential of state supreme courts converge when considering how law develops in state civil courts. We and others have asserted that law development is not happening in lawyerless courts, at least not in the way that American legal scholars conventionally understand law development. This Essay explores the core theoretical assertion that the absence of law development is a characteristic of lawyerless courts. We define key areas of analysis, including questions for empirical inquiry, to advance our understanding of lawyerless law development.
An essential premise of American law is that the law develops through adversarial, lawyered cases that produce written opinions. The assumptions underlying this premise include that both parties are represented; that the parties — through their lawyers — engage in procedures such as motions, briefs, and oral arguments; that judges issue written opinions responding to this adversarial engagement; that parties engage in appeals in a subset of these cases; and that the case law that emerges governs subsequent cases. The assumptions of representation and adversarialism do not hold in state civil courts, where litigants are largely unrepresented and the breadth of social problems people bring to court belie the adversarial construct. Further, written opinions are not the norm in lawyerless trial courts. The combination of limited adversarial process and the absence of written opinions means that appellate activity is minimal, and thus law development in lawyerless courts does not happen in the way we traditionally assume.
We begin by analyzing what we know about the volume and nature of appeals in lawyerless courts. We then use our original data to conceptualize how lawyerless trial courts operate in the absence of law development. Finally, we place questions of lawyerless law development in the context of broader questions of democratic governance
Twenty Years of US Digital Copyright: Adapting from Analogue
Get PDFThis review of the period 2001–21 in US copyright law will summarize digital-dominated developments concerning the scope of exclusive rights and exceptions and liability regimes. It will address several developments, all related to the impact of the internet on the exploitation of works of authorship. Digital storage and communications have called into question the scope of the exclusive rights set out in the US Copyright Act, and they have considerably expanded the reach of the fair use exemption. They have strained statutory and common law regimes of secondary liability and prompted the development of a ‘volition’ predicate to primary liability. While case law concerning non-digital subject matter or scope of protection has also abounded — including the Supreme Court’s rejection of constitutional challenges to Congress’s power to extend the copyright terms of existing works and to restore copyright to certain foreign works that had fallen into the public domain in order to comply with international obligations; the court’s failure to clarify the impenetrable statutory standard for the protection of applied art; and the court’s interpretation of the first sale doctrine to establish a rule of international exhaustion — space constraints compel the choice to confine this overview to the digital domain
Using Child Abuse Specialists to Reduce Unnecessary Child Protective Services Reports and Investigations
No full textExperiencing a child abuse investigation is commonplace in the US. A study by Kim et alcalculated that one-third of all children nationwide might expect to experience such an investigation before turning 18 years, and among Black children, more than half will be subject to a child protective services investigation.
Increasing attention is now given to the problems caused by overreporting of families to child protective services (CPS) agencies. In 2021, only 17.8% of screened-in reports were substantiated. Studies have found a higher substantiation rate for reports by medical professionals, but that rate is still low, and child removal rates in this setting are even lower, suggesting an inefficient allocation of investigative resources. Moreover, children and families often experience these investigations as invasive and harmful.
The number of reports originating from medical practitioners has increased sharply, incongruent with the prevalence of abuse and faster than any other group of mandated reporters. This finding raises concern that health care professionals may misunderstand when a report is warranted and may not be aware of other options. We wish to inform clinicians of the potential harms of unnecessary reporting and to highlight the possibility of consulting a child abuse pediatrician (CAP) prior to reporting, in a subset of cases in which the concern for child abuse is low
Are Police Officers Bayesians? Police Updating in Investigative Stops
Get PDFTheories of rational behavior assume that actors make decisions where the benefits of their acts exceed their costs or losses. If those expected costs and benefits change over time, behavior will change accordingly as actors learn and internalize the parameters of success and failure. In the context of proactive policing, police stops that achieve any of several goals — constitutional compliance, stops that lead to “good” arrests or summonses, stops that lead to seizures of weapons, drugs, or other contraband, or stops that produce good will and citizen cooperation — should signal to officers the features of a stop that increase its rewards or benefits. Having formed a subjective estimate of success (i.e., prior beliefs), officers should observe their outcomes in subsequent encounters and form updated probability estimates, with specific features of the event, with a positive weight on those features. Officers should also learn the features of unproductive stops and adjust accordingly. A rational actor would pursue “good” or “productive” stops and avoid “unproductive” stops by updating their knowledge of these features through experience.
We analyze data on 4.9 million Terry stops in New York City from 2004–16 to estimate the extent of updating by officers in the New York Police Department. We compare models using a frequentist analysis of officer behavior with a Bayesian analysis where subsequent events are weighted by the signals from prior events. By comparing productive and unproductive stops, the analysis estimates the weights or values — an experience effect — that officers assign to the signals of each type of stop outcome. We find evidence of updating using both analytic methods, although the “hit rates” — our measure of stop productivity including recovery of firearms or arrests for criminal behavior — remain low. Updating is independent of total officer stop activity each month, suggesting that learning may be selective and specific to certain stop features. However, hit rates decline as officer stop activity increases. Both updating and hit rates improved as stop rates declined following a series of internal memoranda and trial orders beginning in May 2012. There is also evidence of differential updating by officers conditional on a variety of features of prior and current stops, including suspect race and stop legality. Though our analysis is limited to NYPD stops, given the ubiquity of policing regimes of intensive stop and frisk encounters across the United States, the relevance of these findings reaches beyond New York City. These regimes reveal tensions between the Terry jurisprudence of reasonable suspicion and evidence on contemporary police practices across the country
Investor–State Dispute Settlements: A Hidden Handbrake on Climate Action
Get PDFTo achieve the Paris Agreement’s climate goals, states must move away from fossil fuels. But investor–state dispute settlement (ISDS) — a system that enables companies to take states to international arbitration — can increase the cost of this transition.
Our research shows that fossil fuel companies have historically secured at least US$82.8 billion in damages and large sums continue to be invested in fossil fuels worldwide. To address this problem, investment governance must be harmonised with global climate goals
Global Climate Change and U.S. Law
No full textThis book is a comprehensive treatise on the U.S. laws that are relevant to climate change. It covers federal, state, and local statutes and regulations, as well as international agreements. Their evolution is traced and their current impact on U.S. citizens and companies is analyzed. Key issues such as climate justice, the energy transition, carbon dioxide removal, adaptation to climate impacts, and human rights litigation receive detailed treatment. The book is up to date with coverage of such recent developments as the Inflation Reduction Act and the Supreme Court\u27s decision in West Virginia v. EPA.https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1044/thumbnail.jp
GHG Accounting Methods in the Aluminum Industry
Get PDFPrimary aluminum production is one of the world’s most GHG-intensive industries, and also one where GHG accounting methods have become the most fully developed. GHG reporting for the primary aluminum sector has largely consolidated under the International Aluminium Institute’s (IAI) guidance, although Environment Canada (EC) guidance remains active and Chinese aluminum smelters will soon additionally be required to report their emissions under the China National Development and Reform Commission’s (China NDRC) guidelines, meant to support the development of the Chinese emissions trading system. The IAI method largely follows best GHG accounting practices, but aspects of it can be improved, and differences compared to other methods highlight open areas of contention
BU S3E3
No full textPhoto of Kier Gumbs, Chief Financial Officer of Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc.https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/beyond_unprecedented_podcast/1037/thumbnail.jp
BU S3E4
No full textPhoto of Huw Pill, Chief Economist and Executive Director for Monetary Analysis and Research at the Bank of England.https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/beyond_unprecedented_podcast/1038/thumbnail.jp