Global Health Research Center of Central Asia
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The Major Questions Doctrine: Right Diagnosis, Wrong Remedy
Get PDFThe Supreme Court’s “major questions” doctrine has been attacked as an attempt to revive the nondelegation doctrine. The better view is that this statutory interpretation responds to perceived failings of the Chevron doctrine, which has governed court-agency relations since 1984. This article criticizes the major question doctrine and proposes modifications to the Chevron doctrine that would partially correct its failings while preserving the traditional interpretive role of courts
States of Emergency: COVID-19 and Separation of Powers in the States
Get PDFNo event in recent years has shone a brighter spotlight on state separation of powers than the COVID-19 pandemic. Over a more than two-year period, governors exercised unprecedented authority through suspending laws and regulations, limiting business activities and gatherings, restricting individual movement, and imposing public health requirements. Many state legislatures endorsed these measures or were content to let governors take the lead, but in some states the legislature pushed back, particularly — albeit not only—where the governor and legislative majorities were of different political parties. Some of these conflicts wound up in state supreme courts.
This Essay examines the states’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic through the prism of the separation of powers. After considering the actions governors took and the sources of their authority, it focuses on the principal state court decisions concerning the separation of powers questions arising out of the pandemic. Although governors lost a handful of high-profile decisions, they did quite well overall. Courts often read their powers broadly and rejected challenges to their authority. State judicial analysis in these COVID-19 powers conflicts involved close attention to the specific language of state constitutions and statutes, as well as reliance on doctrines used by federal courts. The Essay then reviews some of the state legislative responses — new laws and proposed constitutional amendments — to gubernatorial power. It concludes by considering what the pandemic experience tells us about state separation of powers, the mix of distinctive state arguments and federal analogies in state court analysis, and the role of partisanship in these disputes
Beyond Unprecedented S3 Ep2 ESG: Losing Its Cool
Get PDFThe corporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) movement has come under fire. After many large corporations began to adopt specific ESG measures in response to shareholder pressure, other shareholder groups are trying to undo them. Inclusive Capital Partners co-founders Lynn Forester de Rothschild ’79 and Jeff Ubben discuss the rise in “anti-woke” shareholder activism, the politicization of ESG, and what lies ahead.https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/beyond_unprecedented_3/1002/thumbnail.jp
Enabling a Just Transition: Protecting Human Rights in Renewable Energy Projects: A Briefing For Policymakers
Get PDFThis briefing provides guidance to policy- and decision-makers (hereafter, “policymakers”) on the benefits of and strategies for taking a human rights-based approach to renewable energy policy. It highlights the various impacts of utility-scale renewable energy projects on peoples and communities, associated risks for policymakers, and explains how national, regional, and global policies can help mitigate those impacts and risks. The briefing addresses different agents of policy- and decision-making: Host states, where renewable energy projects are proposed or located; Home states where corporations pursuing renewable energy investments, especially investments abroad, are based; Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) financing renewable energy investments, especially those required to comply with environmental and social safeguards; and Intergovernmental bodies concerned with socio-economic cooperation, which can set standards regarding the conduct of renewable energy investments. This briefing is part of a series of publications by the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment that provide guidance on adopting a rights-based approach to renewable energy deployment
Family Moves and the Future of Public Education
Get PDFState laws compel school-aged children to attend school while fully funding only public schools. Especially following the COVID-19 pandemic, this arrangement is under attack — from some for unconstitutionally coercing families to expose their children to non-neutral values to which they object and from others for ignoring the developmental needs of students, particularly students of color and in poverty whom public schools have long underserved. This Article argues that fully subsidized public education is constitutional as long as public schools fulfill their mission to model and commit people to liberal democratic values of tolerance and respect for all persons as equal choosers. To be sure, those values are not neutral. But as Brown v. Board famously concluded, their promotion in public schools is perhaps the nation’s and states’ single most compelling interest, because it is essential to the ability of people with diverse beliefs to live together harmoniously while preserving their vast freedoms in other respects. To keep public education from qualifying those freedoms any more than necessary, states give families a right to opt for private education, but at their own expense. This arrangement serves the compelling interest in public education, however, only if public schools — bolstered by compulsory education laws and their uniquely full public subsidization — attract enough families. For well over a century, public schools have attracted around 90% of all school children. Today, however, family moves away from public education are eroding its ability to attract children due principally to public education’s conflation of “public” with bureaucratically “uniform” education — precluding pedagogically, democratically, and equitably essential differentiation among students. The Article proposes ways public schools can better model liberal democratic values by engaging all families in the cooperative and differentiated direction of their children’s learning
Staying the Course: Toward Strong HQIM Implementation in Delaware
Get PDFWith the implementation of high-quality instructional materials (HQIM) and curriculum-based professional learning, Delaware educators, students, and families have ventured into promising, challenging new territory. HQIM ask a great deal of their users. Educators are called upon to abandon traditional approaches to instruction, allowing kids to loudly drive classroom discourse rather than passively taking notes on teacher lectures. Students are asked to grapple with rigorous, problem-based subject matter that offers no easy answers and requires deep analytical thinking and collaboration. Families are asked to support their children’s learning when the materials and resources that come home may feel unfamiliar and overwhelming. For all stakeholders, implementation can, at times, feel like an arduous journey with no clear destination
Turning the Tide: How to Harness the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity to Deliver an ISDS-Free Americas
Get PDFDuring the Summit of the Americas in June 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden announced the launch of negotiations for an Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity (APEP). The Biden administration hopes this initiative can rebuild relationships with countries in the region by increasing cooperation to address economic development and inequality, climate, and other challenges affecting the entire Western Hemisphere. To fulfill this vision and its associated goals, the participating countries must address the severe challenges posed by the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) regime and its escalating threats to the transition to a post-carbon society and the establishment of resilient public health systems in the Americas. In this white paper, Turning the Tide: How to Harness the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity to Deliver an ISDS-Free Americas, we explain how the APEP negotiating process can be leveraged to dismantle ISDS within the region. It includes original data describing the scope of the problem and provides pathways to address both the international and U.S. domestic law requirements for an effective ISDS exit.
CCSI, partnered with ReThink Trade, and Georgetown Law’s Center for the Advancement of the Rule of Law in the Americas, and the Center on Inclusive Trade and Development, and together with Senator Elizabeth Warren and Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, hosted a webinar on the occasion of the release of the report
The International Law Profile of the ALI
Get PDFThough its focus, most notably in its Restatements, has traditionally been on domestic U.S. law, the American Law Institute (ALI) has conspicuously turned “international” in recognition of the fact that U.S. law does not, in the present world, operate in isolation from the law of foreign jurisdictions and international institutions. To be sure, the two most prominent Restatements in the field continue to bear the term “U.S.” in their title: “Restatement of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States” and “The U.S. Law of International Commercial and Investor-State Arbitration.” But both present bodies of law profoundly influenced by, and influencing, foreign and international legal regimes. By contrast, the ALI’s Principles of World Trade Law present the law of a genuine international organization (the World Trade Organization), while the ALI’s Principles of Aggregate Litigation addresses challenges common to jurisdictions around the world. This broader outlook is exemplified by the ALI’s joint projects with the European Law Institute, for which the ALI was very much a model
#SayHerName: Black Women’s Stories of Police Violence and Public Silence
No full textFill the void. Lift your voice. Say Her Name.
Black women, girls, and femmes as young as seven and as old as ninety-three have been killed by the police, though we rarely hear their names or learn their stories. Breonna Taylor, Alberta Spruill, Rekia Boyd, Shantel Davis, Shelly Frey, Kayla Moore, Kyam Livingston, Miriam Carey, Michelle Cusseaux, and Tanisha Anderson are among the many lives that should have been.
#SayHerName provides an analytical framework for understanding Black women\u27s susceptibility to police brutality and state-sanctioned violence, and it explains how — through black feminist storytelling and ritual — we can effectively mobilize various communities and empower them to advocate for racial justice.
Centering Black women’s experiences in police violence and gender violence discourses sends the powerful message that, in fact, all Black lives matter and that the police cannot kill without consequence. This is a powerful story of Black feminist practice, community-building, enablement, and Black feminist reckoning.https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1374/thumbnail.jp
The WTO DSU 2.0: How Can We Go Back to the Future?
Get PDFIn this chapter, Aris Georgopoulos and Petros Mavroidis examine the contribution of the WTO dispute settlement body to the resolution of trade disputes. This chapter documents the problems and challenges faced by the WTO’s dispute settlement body and reveals their debilitating impact on its work. This chapter then puts forward concrete proposals for the establishment of a new WTO Court and explains why such a course of action has a realistic chance of breaking the current impasse and creating an effective dispute settlement body for trade disputes