Global Health Research Center of Central Asia
Columbia Law School Scholarship ArchiveNot a member yet
5770 research outputs found
Sort by
Legal Pathways to Biden\u27s Climate Goals
Get PDFAchieving President Biden’s goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, with interim targets of being halfway there by 2030 and having entirely clean electricity by 2035, is possible with law and technologies that already exist or can be readily imagined. In the process, many more jobs would be created than lost, and aspects of the environment beyond climate change would be greatly improved. But it is a massive undertaking
Getting From Ideas to Reality: Building Political Support to Translate Good Ideas Into Actual Practice
Get PDFLand-based investment in agriculture, forestry, renewable energy, mining, and other natural resources can contribute to sustainable development, but positive outcomes are neither inevitable nor easy to achieve. Responsible land-based investment (RLBI) requires good governance (through laws and policies) as well as good practice. This document focuses on how government officials can improve the governance and practice of RLBI by building stronger political support.
Government officials confront complicated political realities on a daily basis. In many places, obstacles to RLBI are not due to a lack of technical expertise or resources, but rather are linked to low levels of commitment from key actors who have influence over relevant outcomes. In other words, government officials who aim to advance RLBI may have the “ability to implement” good policies and practices, but still be stymied by a lack of desire to implement among the powerful.
Why is this? Ideas about good practices are processed and implemented through institutions. Institutions are ultimately shaped by people, interests, and the systems and structures within which they operate. Changes in policy or practice, even if technically sound, require the support of powerful actors to take hold
The Struggle for Human Rights: Essays in Honour of Philip Alston
No full textThe Struggle for Human Rights evaluates the themes of law, politics, and practice which together define international human rights practice and scholarship. Taking as it\u27s inspiration the 40 year career of international human rights advocate Philip Alston, this book of essays examines foundational debates central to the evolution of the human rights project. It critiques the reform of human rights institutions and reflects on the place of human rights practice in contemporary society.
Bringing together leading scholars, practitioners, and critics of human rights from a variety of disciplines, The Struggle for Human Rights addresses the most urgent questions posed within the field of human rights today – its practice and its theory. Rethinking assumptions and re-evaluating strategies in the law, politics, and practice of international human rights, this book is essential reading for academics and human rights professionals around the world.https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1320/thumbnail.jp
Slavery\u27s Constitution: Rethinking the Federal Consensus
Get PDFFor at least half a century, scholars of the early American Constitution have noted the archival prominence of a doctrine known as the “federal consensus.” This doctrine instructed that Congress had no power to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it existed. Despite its ubiquity in the records, our understanding of how and why this doctrine emerged is hazy at best. Working from a conceptual map of America’s founding that features thirteen local governments coalescing into two feuding sections of North and South, commentators have tended to explain the federal consensus either as a vestige of a much older constitutional tradition rooted in localism or as the result of a brokered political compromise between the sections. Cast as an archaic relic of the colonial era or as a one-off political compromise, the doctrine has appeared in the most recent scholarship as one that by the mid-1800s had devolved into a limp and unpersuasive rhetorical disclaimer.
This Essay offers a different origins story for the federal consensus, one that invites us to re-center the doctrine’s central importance in the founding constitutional order. Drawing on a model of inquiry that expands the conventional map of America’s founding to include the material modes of production and exchange, this Essay allows us to see how the bedrock principle of noninterference emerged not only from the oft cited vestiges of localism and sectionalism but also from the customary practices and exigencies of long-distance maritime trade in the Atlantic world. As economic historians have shown, long before the doctrine appeared in print in 1790, America’s merchant class had forged a trading network along the Atlantic coast, creating an interregional economy that spanned from the Massachusetts Bay to the plantation coast and outer-lying islands. Predicated on a rule of noninterference with the underlying modes of enslaved labor on which white wealth depended, these preexisting norms of racialized property ownership and commercial exchange provided a useful starting point for the rules of constitutional union at a time when the concepts and structures of public law constitutional governance in the newly created United States remained inchoate and ill-defined.
By recovering this genealogy and expanding our map of the founding, this Essay offers a more complete view of the origins of one of the oldest and most consequential rules of constitutional union. In doing so, it allows us to see the institution of racial slavery not simply as one confined to a single section of the South and upheld by its peculiar doctrine of states’ rights but as a fundamentally American institution, one upheld by a rule of federal and state inaction in the face of slavery’s systemic taking of Black lives
Race and Equity in the Age of Unicorns
Get PDFThis Article critically examines startup culture and its legal predicates. The Article analyzes innovation culture as a whole and uses the downfall of Theranos to illustrate the deficiencies in Silicon Valley culture, centering on race and class. The Article demonstrates that the rise and fall of the unicorn startup Theranos and its founder, Elizabeth Holmes, is emblematic of the problem with the glorification and pursuit of the unicorn designation for startup ventures. The examination of the downfall of Theranos exposes how investors, founders, and others in Silicon Valley engage with each other in the context of pursuing unicorn status. The saga of Theranos lays bare how the wealthy and the privileged control the private financial markets and underscores the structural inequities within the startup ecosystem. Such a structure promotes certain types of entrepreneurs to the exclusion of others. Diverse and nontraditional entrepreneurs in the startup world face tremendous hurdles to securing financing, mentorship and media exposure. In stark contrast, founders like Holmes benefit from a perception of worthiness drawn from factors such as race, socioeconomic status, pedigree and social connections. This Article examines how the culture of creating the next unicorn has ramifications beyond fraud and risk, but also socio-economic consequences
National Security, Leaks and Freedom of the Press: The Pentagon Papers Fifty Years On
No full textOne of the most vexing and perennial questions facing any democracy is how to balance the government\u27s legitimate need to conduct its operations-especially those related to protecting the national security-in secret, with the public\u27s right and responsibility to know what its government is doing. There is no easy answer to this issue, and different nations embrace different solutions. In the United States, at the constitutional level, the answer begins exactly half a century ago with the Supreme Court\u27s landmark 1971 decision in the Pentagon Papers case. The final decision, though, left many important questions unresolved. Moreover, the issue of leaks and secrecy has cropped up repeatedly since, most recently in the Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning cases. In National Security, Leaks and Freedom of the Press , two of America\u27s leading First Amendment scholars, Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone, have gathered a group of the nation\u27s leading constitutional scholars-including John Brennan, Eric Holder, Cass R. Sunstein, and Michael Morell, among many others-to delve into important dimensions of the current system, to explain how we should think about them, and to offer as many solutions as possible.https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1359/thumbnail.jp
Looking Back with a Legend: Ira Millstein Reflects on the Impact of Milton Friedman\u27s Views on Corporate Governance
Get PDFIn this discussion, corporate governance legend and frequent The Business Lawyer contributor Ira M. Millstein reflects on the impact of Milton Friedman and his adherents on our corporate governance system and economy generally, as well as the path forward to an economy that functions better for the many. Millstein takes an historical perspective in conversation with former Chief Justice and Chancellor of Delaware, Leo E. Strine, Jr., moderated by Professor Eric Talley of Columbia Law School. Millstein situates the evolution of our corporate governance system, including the effect of Friedman and the Chicago school on it, within the political dynamics of the last fifty years since the New York Times published the essay, “A Friedman Doctrine —The Social Responsibility Of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.
Unspoken Criticism: Audiovisual Forms of Critique as Fair Use
Get PDFThis Note argues that the traditional legal framework for analyzing a work of alleged criticism as fair use is particularly constraining for YouTube reaction videos and other audiovisual forms of criticism that largely critique or comment on an original work in a non-spoken, visual manner. It discusses the emphasis that the current fair use jurisprudence places on spoken and written critical elements when undertaking a fair use analysis of a work of criticism, then advocates for a new conception of fair use criticism that incorporates film-specific analytical techniques and concepts when analyzing the critical elements of online audiovisual works. Part I discusses the statutory codification of the fair use doctrine in copyright law and how the doctrine has been shaped through the years by subsequent judicial interpretation. Part I also discusses the history of YouTube reaction videos as a unique audiovisual format. Part II explores the ways in which courts have recently applied the fair use doctrine to alleged works of audiovisual criticism and the emphasis courts place on spoken and written critical elements. Part III argues that courts assessing online audiovisual works as alleged works of criticism should incorporate analytical tools and interpretive theories commonly utilized in film studies contexts — including an analysis of editing, shot composition, and camera movement — when parsing alleged works of audiovisual criticism for transformativeness under factor one of the fair use test. Finally, Part IV uses a recently decided fair use case out of the Southern District of New York as a real-life example to explore how a court could apply film-specific analytical tools to more accurately identify and assess the critical elements of a work of audiovisual criticism for fair use purposes
On Cooperationism: An End to the Economic Plague
Get PDFOver thirty million Americans just filed first-time unemployment claims as a result of the economic devastation caused by the coronavirus pandemic, pushing unemployment to its highest levels since the Great Depression. Despite that, the US stock markets recorded in April their best month since 1987; after an initial shock, the markets rallied steadily, rising over 30 percent since their lows in late March. Most economists sounded puzzled and offered fanciful daily explanations. Even Paul Krugman had little to say, suggesting that Investors are buying stocks in part because they have nowhere else to go.
But it’s no wonder the markets defied the economic crash. For the markets, there is nothing like a good crisis when the right people are in power. Philip Mirowski wrote tellingly about this during the last debacle — the financial meltdown of 2008 — under the moniker Never let a serious crisis go to waste. Now, too, the Faustian logic as to why institutional investors just put their bets on the market should not escape us
A Major Simplification of the OECD’s Pillar 1 Proposal
Get PDFIn this report, Graetz suggests major modifications to the OECD’s pillar 1 blueprint proposal to create a new taxing right for multinational digital income and some product sales that would greatly simplify the proposal. The modifications rely on readily available existing financial information and would achieve certainty in the application of pillar 1, while adhering to its fundamental structure and policies