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Banning the Full-Face Veil: Freedom of Religion and Non-Discrimination in the Human Rights Committee and the European Court of Human Rights
Get PDFWhat is, or should be, the relationship between claims of violations of the right to manifest one’s religion as a result of a generally applicable law or policy, and claims of indirect discrimination on grounds of religion?
The interrelationship of human rights protections is not a new question. Just as rights may conflict, rights may also overlap. The arrest of a human rights activist for expressing her views could violate both the prohibition against arbitrary detention and her freedom of expression. Excessive use of force against peaceful demonstrators could violate their rights to freedom of assembly, freedom of expression, and security of the person, and the prohibition against torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment. Certain actions or inactions may implicate specific rights, such as the rights to language and culture, and to freedom of religion, opinion, or belief, and may also constitute discrimination on those same grounds. The relationship between closely related rights such as the freedoms of expression and assembly also may not be well-elaborated because human rights courts and other bodies at times may, for reasons of economy, restraint, or institutional tradition, refrain from examining some claims once they have found violations of others
Smart Surfaces, Smart Cities: Reducing Heat and Promoting Equity in Urban Areas
Get PDFThe summer of 2021 underscored that we are all affected by climate change impacts, whether in the form of heatwaves, fires, or extreme flooding. But some Americans are far more affected than others. Urban centers are hotter than rural areas due to urban heat island effect, a phenomenon caused by pavement, buildings, and other surfaces in cities that absorb and retain heat. In the United States, urban heat island effect results in a temperature difference of up to 7. degrees between cities and their surrounding rural areas. Moreover, within cities, extreme heat disproportionately harms communities of color and low-income communities. As climate change continues to raise baseline temperatures and make deadly heat waves more likely to occur, addressing urban heat island effect has become an urgent issue
Attribution Science in Takings Litigation
Get PDFClimate science plays a central role in climate litigation, and cases under the Takings Clause of the United States’ and many state constitutions are no exception. In the climate context, takings cases to date have involved claims that challenge the constitutionality of both adaptation and mitigation measures. For instance, real estate developers have claimed that land use and zoning regulations that seek to reduce exposure to climate change impacts constitute regulatory takings. Property owners have claimed that restrictions on the development of fossil fuel infrastructure upset their investment-backed expectations. And property owners adversely impacted by climate-related flood control measures have sought compensation for their harms. In these and other cases, the foreseeability of climate change impacts and the causal connections between local action and global climate change may or may not be explicit elements of a claim, but they remain critical issues for litigants and courts to address.
This paper explicates the role of attribution science in climate-related takings cases. That science factors into plaintiffs’ claims, government defenses, and judicial decisions. For the purposes of this analysis, this paper examines how marshalling the best available climate change attribution science could bolster governments’ defenses of climate regulations. The next section reviews the legal framework for takings cases and provides a brief primer on attribution science. The paper then turns to three legal themes: (1) linking local mitigation to global impacts, (2) resetting expectations about how land can be used and, (3) relevant to flood control cases, the relative benefits conferred by imperfect flood control measures. As we shall see, attribution science has a clear and important role to play in how courts resolve climate change-related takings claims
The Three Permissions: Presidential Removal and the Statutory Limits of Agency Independence
Get PDFSeven words stand between the President and the heads of over a dozen “independent agencies”: inefficiency, neglect of duty, and malfeasance in office (INM). The President can remove the heads of these agencies for INM and only INM. But neither Congress nor the courts have defined INM and hence the extent of agency independence. Stepping into this void, some proponents of presidential power argue that INM allows the President to dismiss officials who do not follow presidential directives. Others contend that INM is unconstitutional because it prevents Presidents from fulfilling their duty to take care that the laws are faithfully executed. This Article recovers the lost history of INM, explaining its origins and meaning, inverting our current understanding of its purpose, and rejecting both challenges to agency independence. It shows that INM provisions are not removal “protections” that prevent at-pleasure removal; they are removal permissions that authorize removal where it is otherwise prohibited by an officer’s term of years, a tenure long understood to bar executive removal for any reason. INM provisions are narrow exceptions to term tenures: Neglect of duty and malfeasance in office cash out an official’s failure to faithfully execute official duties, while inefficiency relates to government waste and ineptitude. INM provisions do not permit the President to remove agency heads for failing to follow presidential directives. But they do not clash with the Take Care Clause either, because even on an expansive reading of the clause, INM provisions authorize Presidents to remove unfaithful or incompetent officials
Spoofing and Its Regulation
Get PDFNearly a century after the United States enacted its first securities laws, urgent questions remain as to the scope of manipulation law: whether manipulation is possible in principle, and if so, how the law should respond in practice. Sharp disagreement among courts, economists, and legal scholars as to whether trading or quoting activity constitutes illegal manipulation has led to a legal framework that lacks precision and cogency. Moreover, the poorly articulated normative basis for court rulings has resulted in enforcement that is both under-inclusive and over-inclusive in ways that do a poor job of discouraging socially harmful transactions and enabling socially beneficial ones.
This Article seeks to clarify this confusion. Drawing on microstructure and financial economics, this Article offers a new understanding of a common kind of quote-driven manipulation, often referred to as “spoofing.” By employing an analytical and normative framework developed previously by two of the authors in assessing another major form of manipulation, trade-driven manipulation, this Article assesses the impact of spoofing on what occurs in the securities markets and carefully evaluates its effects on social welfare and economic efficiency. The result is a new understanding of quote-based manipulation that helps resolve essential questions in manipulation law and provides guidance for future regulation and enforcement
Charles Reich and the Legal History of Privacy
Get PDFHistorians’ interest in Reich offers a case study of the relationship between historical and legal studies. What can legal scholars learn from historians, and what can historians learn from legal scholarship? This Essay will explore these two questions by focusing on Igo’s The Known Citizen since she encountered Reich not with the dual citizenship of a legal historian but as an intellectual historian. I will first highlight what legal scholars can learn from historians by summarizing the main arguments in The Known Citizen. Then, I will provide an alternative legal account to Igo’s history of privacy, which may clear up some questions that Igo raised but could not answer. Finally, this Essay will conclude with Reich himself as a link between historians, who read him as a primary source, and law professors, who read his work as legal scholarship. Reading Reich as both, I argue, can deepen our understanding of the history of privacy in the twentieth-century United States
Transnational Litigation in a Nutshell
No full textThis title identifies and explores recurring issues of jurisdiction, procedure, and choice of law entailed in the resolution of transnational disputes in U.S. courts. It covers the sources of transnational litigation law in the United States, personal and subject matter jurisdiction, parallel litigation, foreign sovereign immunity and the act of state doctrine, choice of law, extraterritorial discovery, extraterritorial provisional relief, recognition of foreign judgments, and the role of courts in connection with international arbitration.https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1330/thumbnail.jp
“Let those who have an experience of prison speak”: The Critique & Praxis of the Prisons Information Group (1970-1980)
Get PDFAs the May ’68 revolution reached a boiling point, a remarkable assemblage of philosophers, writers, and incarcerated persons, doctors, nurses, social workers, and sociologists, activists and organizers, and militants in France turned their attention to the problem of the prison. At a time when prisons were mostly hidden from view, practically impenetrable in France to outsiders, at a time long before we recognized mass incarceration in countries like the United States, the Prisons Information Group (the Groupe d’information sur les prisons or the “GIP”) coalesced to spotlight the travesty of justice that is the prison – one that continues unabated today or, even worse, is exacerbated in Western liberal democracies. As I write these words, people are being violated, slashed, stabbed, and deprived of food and security at the jail on Rikers Island in New York City, with almost a third of the guard staff not even showing up for work. As of mid-October 2021, thirteen people imprisoned at Rikers have died this year. Our jails and prisons are broken – an intolerable crisis, as the GIP maintained already in 1970
Should the U.S. Government Actively Assert its Own Patents?
Get PDFOn March 10, 2021, our journal partnered with the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy to host a symposium addressing the role and impact of U.S. innovation policy on access to medicine. Our 2021 Symposium Issue — Volume 11, Issue 1 — captures that event.
The following article represents the second of four panels. This panel asked, “Should the U.S. government actively assert its own patents?” The panel was moderated by Christopher Morten, Deputy Director of NYU Law’s Technology Law & Policy Clinic. The panelists included Barry Datlof, Chief of Business Development and Commercialization in the Office of Medical Technology Transfer at the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command, Professor Amy Kapczynski of Yale Law School, Donna Meuth, Associate General Counsel and Lead Attorney of the U.S. Intellectual Property Department of Eisai, and Zain Rizvi, a policy researcher at Public Citizen who focuses on pharmaceutical innovation and access to medicines
Handbook for SDG-Aligned Food Companies: Four Pillar Framework Standards
Get PDFThe world food system is in crisis. Outright hunger, unhealthy diets and malnutrition occur parallel to food losses and waste. Farming families in poor countries suffer from extreme poverty. And food production is environmentally unsustainable and increasingly vulnerable to extreme weather events caused by climate change. A historic change of direction is needed to bring about a new era of food system sustainability. Our work aims to help companies, investors and other stakeholders move towards a more sustainable food system that is aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals.
Transforming the world food system to achieve sustainability in all its dimensions is a major challenge. Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals will require managing major changes to the global food system responsibly, involving hundreds of millions of farmers and their families, global supply chains, thousands of food producing companies, diverse food production systems and local ecologies, food processing and a great diversity of food traditions and cultures.
Food companies are engaged in food production, trade, processing, and consumer sales around the world. While they have distinct roles “from farm to fork,” they all share the same responsibility: to be part of the global transformation towards food system sustainability.
For more on CCSI and SDSN’s work on corporate alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals, see our framework defining SDG-aligned business practices in the energy sector