Global Health Research Center of Central Asia
Columbia Law School Scholarship ArchiveNot a member yet
5770 research outputs found
Sort by
Criminalized Students, Reparations, and the Limits of Prospective Reform
Get PDFRecent reforms discourage schools from referring students to criminal law enforcement for typical disciplinary infractions. Though rightly celebrated, these reforms remain mere half-measures, as they emphasize prospective decriminalization of student conduct without grappling with the harm to generations of former students – disproportionately Black – who have been targeted by criminalizing policies of the past. Through the lens of reparations theory, this Article sets out the case for retroactive and reparations-based redress for the criminalization of students. Reparations models reposition moral norms. They acknowledge state harm, clarify the losses to criminalized students, allow for expansive forms of redress, and cast restoration of opportunity as a project to benefit society broadly.
As families have long protested, and data corroborates, schools’ reliance on criminal law mechanisms has significant impacts. Reforms many places reconsider practices of prosecuting students under order-related misdemeanors, such as “disruption of class” and “disorderly conduct.” Some reforms lead to policymakers striking or altering criminal law statutes and imposing procedural protections. Reducing criminal law’s footprint in schools helps protect future students from the resulting harms of criminalization. Former students still face open cases, warrants, and criminal debt. Many individuals navigate criminal records, health impacts from the trauma of criminal law enforcement in school, and loss of access to educational and other public institutions. These impacts reverberate generationally in communities where schools enforce criminalizing policies. These continuing impacts indicate the limits of prospective reforms.
This Article argues that transformation of systems that harm and criminalize students requires both retroactive decriminalization and reparations-based policies. The burden of overcoming criminalization continues to rest with former students rather than the state. Repair of criminalization must incorporate accountability and redress. The Article offers models towards restoration of stolen opportunity
Structural Biases in Structural Constitutional Law
Get PDFStructural constitutional law regulates the workings of government and supplies the rules of the political game. Whether by design or by accident, these rules sometimes tilt the playing field for or against certain political factions – not just episodically, based on who holds power at a given moment, but systematically over time – in terms of electoral outcomes or policy objectives. In these instances, structural constitutional law is itself structurally biased.
This Article identifies and begins to develop the concept of such structural biases, with a focus on biases affecting the major political parties. Recent years have witnessed a revival of political conflict over the basic terms of the U.S. constitutional order. We suggest that this phenomenon, and a large part of structural constitutional conflict in general, is best explained by the interaction between partisan polarization and structural bias, each of which can intensify the other. The Article also offers a typology of structural biases, keyed to the contemporary United States but potentially applicable to any system. To date, legal scholars have lagged social scientists in investigating the efficiency, distributional, and political effects of governance arrangements. The concept of structural bias, we aim to show, can help bridge this disciplinary gap and thereby advance the study of constitutional design and constitutional politics
Approvals and Timing of New Formulations of Novel Drugs Approved by the US Food and Drug Administration Between 1995 and 2010 and Followed Through 2021
Get PDFNew formulations of prescription drugs can improve convenience and tolerability for patients, but they also constitute manufacturer strategies to extend brand-name drug market exclusivity periods. We examined whether new formulations of brand-name novel drugs were associated with novel drugs’ sales and/or therapeutic value, as well as characterized first new formulations’ approval timing relative to the novel drug’s generic approval. We found that manufacturers are several times more likely to secure Food and Drug Administration approval for a new formulation for existing drugs that have reached blockbuster status. (Blockbuster drugs are the most profitable drugs with more than $1 billion in annual sales, but are not necessarily the most innovative or clinically meaningful drugs.) Manufacturers also dramatically reduced pursuing approval for new formulations once their drugs began to face generic competition. In contrast, companies did not develop new formulations for drugs that were considered the most therapeutically valuable, innovative, or clinically useful. Thus, while the modified formulations may not be innovative or clinically meaningful themselves, drug manufacturers frequently do not alter drugs that are particularly valuable and innovative to begin with. Our study shows that drugs’ revenue, as opposed to patient benefit, is the clear driver for reformulating drugs
Taking AIM 3
No full texthttps://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/ross_smith_taking_aim/1002/thumbnail.jp
Judge Williams on Administrative Law
Get PDFIt is an honor to speak of Judge Williams’s contributions to administrative law. I did not know him well, but greatly enjoyed the interactions we had, either at various conferences or, more recently, as part of the American Law Institute’s Restatement Fourth of Property, of which I am an associate reporter and he was a very valued member of the advisory committee.
I nevertheless feel a strong kinship with Judge Williams since I believe he was the one judge in all the country who shared an academic background most similar to mine. He taught Administrative Law, Environmental Law, and Property at Colorado before joining the bench. These are the same three subjects that have been the primary focus of my teaching career. He was also strongly influenced by the law and economics movement of the 1970s, something which is also characteristic of my own intellectual odyssey. Of course, the match is not perfect. I have never taught oil and gas law and I do not enjoy delving into FERC cases, although I have written a bit about the regulation of fracking. But in reading Judge Williams’s opinions and articles, I have always felt I was adsorbing thoughts from someone on my own wavelength
Conflicts Between GHG Accounting Methodologies in the Steel Industry
Get PDFAccurate, verifiable, and comparable greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions data throughout supply chains in the materials sector are necessary to drive decarbonization. This is particularly the case for the steel supply chain, a major source of GHG emissions with untapped potential for reduction. However, emissions accounting methods used by the steel industry suffer from gaps and misalignment, resulting in significant differences in reported GHG emissions. The result is a patchwork reporting landscape vulnerable to manipulation and miscommunication, generating little actionable data for policymakers, producers, customers, and investors. These shortcomings highlight the need for a harmonized carbon accounting framework for the steel industry that bridges these disparities. Such a framework is urgently needed to guide time- and capital-intensive investments towards decarbonizing steel supply chains.
A leading partner of the Coalition on Materials Emissions Transparency (COMET), the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment (CCSI) conducted a comprehensive comparison of GHG accounting frameworks pertinent to the steel industry. This comparison identified the critical discrepancies existing between the methods examined and resulted in proposed solutions to be detailed in further research
Comments on Preliminary Draft 8 [black letter and comments]
Get PDFPD8 represents a great deal of labor, for which the Reporters deserve recognition. As detailed below, however, PD8’s occasional departures from or omissions of statutory text may not only be misleading or confusing, but – as has been the case with prior drafts – often have the result, if not the purpose, of whittling down the scope of copyright protection. In addition to identifying those instances and explaining their consequences, the following comments will suggest clarifications to some of the Comments and Illustrations
Cases and Materials on State and Local Government Law
No full textLike its predecessors, the 9th Edition focuses on the critical roles played by states and local governments and the complex structure of our state-local system. It challenges students to understand the values that inform the distribution of powers between states and local governments; the distinctive structures and organization of states and local governments; and the competing models of local government that frame the field. It then takes on local government formation and boundary change; home rule and state-local disputes; interlocal conflict and regional governance; state and local finance; and the local role in delivering government services. This Edition contains new treatments of state constitutions and city charters, state-local preemption conflicts, state and local taxation, policing, and more pervasive attention to the interplay of state and local government law with racial justice and social and economic equity.https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1050/thumbnail.jp
The Democratic (Il)legitimacy of Assembly-Line Litigation
Get PDFMillions of debt cases are filed in the civil courts every year. In debt actions, asymmetrical representation is the norm, with the plaintiff almost always represented by counsel and the defendant very rarely so. A number of jurisdictions report that up to ninety-nine percent of defendants in debt cases appear pro se — a figure that calls into question the basic legitimacy of these proceedings.
Professor Daniel Wilf-Townsend’s central contribution to the literature on debt collection, and state civil justice more broadly, is to demonstrate through sophisticated empirics what has long been anecdotally reported: that a cluster of corporate plaintiffs he dubs “top filers” are responsible for a large share of debt collection litigation. Wilf-Townsend surveyed top filer activity across twenty court systems in a single year to provide a snapshot-in-time of their influence, finding that an average of about twenty-three percent of debt suits in each state are brought by just ten corporate plaintiffs — each of which brings tens or hundreds of thousands of claims a year and has instituted routinized, assembly-line methods for railroading pro se defendants. This empirical finding is significant in providing rich detail on the identity of the corporate entities running the debt collection mill in state civil courts. As Wilf-Townsend asserts, it also provides insight into the types of reforms that may be most effective. His prescriptions focus on ways to rein in corporate filings, and to do this he puts forward a number of options for reforming the courts: congestion pricing for top filers to increase the cost of litigation, class actions brought by defendants against top filers in violation of consumer laws, and a reconfiguration of the judicial role in which judges actively inspect the validity of top filer claims.
Wilf-Townsend’s research adds an unexamined dimension to our understanding of debt collection proceedings, which, for various reasons related to the way state courts operate, are largely obscured from public view. His novel empirical work provides a window into corporate monopolization of the courts, which further illuminates the power differential between plaintiffs and defendants in debt court. This research is critical and difficult to conduct — and far too little of it is undertaken.
We take Wilf-Townsend’s articulation of civil justice failure one step further. In doing so, we question both the democratic legitimacy of debt collection courts and the adequacy of incremental reform that targets the structure of litigation. In this Response, we take a panoramic picture of state civil courts, and debt cases in particular, and name specific features of the courts that must be taken into account in crafting reform prescriptions
TTG 03
No full textPhoto of Susan P. Sturm, George M. Jaffin Professor of Law and Social Responsibility at Columbia Law School.https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/through_the_gale_podcast/1013/thumbnail.jp