Global Health Research Center of Central Asia
Columbia Law School Scholarship ArchiveNot a member yet
5770 research outputs found
Sort by
The Federal Reserve and the 2020 Economic and Financial Crisis
Get PDFThis Article provides a comprehensive legal analysis of the Federal Reserve\u27s response to the 2020 economic and financial crisis. First, it examines the sixteen ad hoc lending facilities that the Fed established to fight the crisis and sorts them into two categories. Six advance the Fed\u27s monetary mission and were designed to halt a run on financial institutions. Ten go beyond the Fed\u27s traditional role and are designed to directly support financial markets and the real economy. Second, it maps these programs onto the statutory framework for money and banking. It shows that Congress\u27s signature crisis legislation, the CARES Act, suspended several existing restrictions on Fed lending sub silentio. And it reveals how the Fed\u27s lending to securities dealers and foreign central banks, a practice dating back more than fifty years, has never been expressly authorized by Congress. Third, it argues that these tensions reflect deficiencies in our contemporary economic and financial architecture. Finally, it suggests reforms targeted at improving the government\u27s response to future economic and financial emergencies
Extending Postpartum Medicaid: State and Federal Policy Options During and After COVID-19
Get PDFThe United States is facing a maternal health crisis with rising rates of maternal mortality and morbidity and stark disparities in maternal outcomes by race and socioeconomic status. Among the efforts to address this issue, one policy proposal is gaining particular traction: extending the period of Medicaid eligibility for pregnant women beyond 60 days after childbirth. The authors examine the legislative and regulatory pathways most readily available for extending postpartum Medicaid, including their relative political, economic, and public health trade-offs. They also review the state and federal policy activity to date and discuss the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the prospects for policy change
Presidential Primacy Amidst Democratic Decline
Get PDFFifty years ago, when the Harvard Law Review asked Professor Harry Kalven, Jr., to take stock of the Supreme Court’s 1970 Term, Kalven faced a task not unlike Professor Cristina Rodríguez’s. That Term’s Court had two new members, Justices Harry Blackmun and Warren Burger. The Nixon Administration was young, but clearly bent on making its own stamp on American law, including via the Supreme Court. Kalven thus expected to see “dislocations” when he reviewed the Court’s recent handiwork. He reported the opposite. Surveying a Term that included such cases as Palmer v. Thompson, Younger v. Harris, Boddie v. Connecticut, and Citizens to Preserve Overton Park v. Volpe, Kalven noted significant doctrinal developments, but ultimately found “the continuities” more striking than “the discontinuities.” Perhaps he hoped to assuage fears that the Court was becoming “a political agency and nothing more.” In any event, he underscored the Court’s institutional “stamina” and the “powerful pressure towards continuity.”
By contrast, Rodríguez’s Foreword emphasizes discontinuity — not in the output of the Supreme Court from Term to Term but in the legal and policy orientations of the executive branch as it has transitioned from President Trump to President Biden and as it will transition to other leadership in the future. In her telling, because the Court is, in important respects, a political agency (although also something more), she urges it not to impose undue impediments on Executive-led change.
We read Rodríguez’s Foreword as a compelling and nuanced defense of presidential primacy (although, importantly, she does not claim that exact term). She offers a description of the contemporary legal and political landscape in which the inauguration of a new President sometimes initiates a political “regime change,” marked by Executive-led efforts to make consequential changes in law and policy (that is, to instantiate a new “legal regime”). She then urges readers to be comfortable with both types of change — to accept that electoral victories bring with them “control of the machinery that turns political visions into everyday realities” and, moreover, to want a government that can be nimble and energetic, even when a new regime does not align with one’s personal preferences. Put simply, she offers a vision of contemporary democratic governance in which “regime change,” emanating from the executive branch, is both what we have and what we need. That one regime will undo some of the work of a previous regime is not an argument against presidential primacy, but rather an argument in its favor.
Our Response makes one major point: however appealing we may find Rodríguez’s argument from a pragmatic and presentist perspective, we should recognize that it exists amidst — and sometimes draws its appeal from — troubling historical developments in the workings of our democratic institutions. The urgency of our current problems, the relative ease of government by “pen” and “phone” — these are reasons to be attracted to Rodríguez’s vision, but they are also arguably symptomatic of structural failings. They should be recognized as such, alongside a recognition of forces that now threaten democracy itself. A broader theoretical and historical view makes this clear
A Ringing Endorsement of Lawyers, and the Most Important Development in Child Protection Law
Get PDFTwo empirical studies demonstrating the impact of vigorous family defense legal work on child protection cases bookended the 2010s. In 2012, Mark Courtney and Jennifer Hook found that cases in which a specialized interdisciplinary law office (ILO) represented parents had faster reunifications, guardianships, and adoptions than similar cases with different parental representation, though it did not explore how those results were obtained. In 2019, Lucas Gerber, Yuk Pang, Timothy Ross, Martin Guggenheim, Peter Pecora, and Joel Miller found that, compared to solo and small office practitioners, ILOs in New York City hastened reunification and guardianships for their clients, leading to 118 fewer days in foster care per child on average, without any negative child safety outcomes
How the Administrative State Got to This Challenging Place
Get PDFWritten for a dispersed agrarian population using hand tools in a local economy, our Constitution now controls an American government orders of magnitude larger that has had to respond to profound changes in transportation, communication, technology, economy, and scientific understanding. How did our government get to this place? The agencies Congress has created to meet these changes now face profound new challenges: transition from the paper to the digital age; the increasing centralization in an opaque, political presidency of decisions that Congress has assigned to diverse, relatively expert and transparent bodies; the thickening, as well, of the political layer within agencies themselves; and the increasing judicial use of analytic techniques invoking the expectations of those who wrote the Constitution so long ago and in such different circumstances. Never easy, finding the appropriate balance between law and politics presents major challenges today
Deterrence Theory: Key Findings and Challenges
Get PDFThis chapter reviews the key findings of the optimal deterrence theory and discusses the remaining challenges. Some of these challenges reflect current modeling choices and limitations. These include the treatment of the offender’s gains in the social welfare function; the design of the damages multiplier in a realistic, multi-period framework; the effects of different types of uncertainty on behavior; and the study of optional, imperfectly enforced, threshold-based regimes – that is, regimes that reflect the most common real-world regulatory setting. Other challenges arise because several key regulatory features and enforcement outcomes are inconsistent with the deterrence theory’s predictions and prescriptions. These inconsistencies include the “abnormally” high levels of compliance, the pervasiveness of gain-based (rather than harm-based) sanctions, the widespread use of offense history in sanctions design, the variation of sanctions based on legal aggressiveness, and the significance of the offender’s mental state in the determinations of both liability and sanctions. The chapter discusses how the recent optimal deterrence scholarship has addressed – but has not fully resolved – all these challenges
We the People (of Faith): The Supremacy of Religious Rights in the Shadow of a Pandemic
Get PDFLate on a Friday evening in April 2021, over a year into the COVID-19 crisis, the Supreme Court issued a brief opinion that dramatically transformed constitutional law. In the midst of a once-in-a-lifetime global pandemic, the Court ruled in Tandon v. Newsom that state and local governments seeking to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus may not restrict in-person religious gatherings more rigorously than any other type of activity, such as shopping for groceries or working at a warehouse. The opinion was only one in a barrage of cases filed in federal courts across the country — many brought by conservative legal nonprofits — seeking to deny states and localities the power to apply COVID restrictions to religious practitioners
New Report Documenting Abortion Bans in Protestant & Secular Hospitals in the U.S. South
Get PDFHospitals across the U.S. South strictly regulate the provision of abortion, leading to delays and denials of care for patients facing severe pregnancy complications according to this report released by Columbia Law School’s Law, Rights, and Religion Project (LRRP) in partnership with investigative reporter Amy Littlefield
Making Learning Work: A Family Guide to Supporting Your Child in Hybrid and Remote Learning
Get PDFAre you still trying to figure out how to support your child’s learning in a way that is safe and works for your child and family? Many families are in the same situation.
We hope this guide lightens your load and helps you make schooling decisions that meet your needs. Inside you will find practical tips, resources, and tools for use during the pandemic and beyond
Hacer que la Educación Funcione: Una Guía Familiar para Ayudar a su Hijo en la Educación Híbrida y a Distancia (Making Learning Work: A Family Guide to Supporting Your Child in Hybrid and Remote Learning)
Get PDF¿Todavía está tratando de averiguar cómo apoyar la educación de su hijo de una manera segura y que funcione para su hijo y su familia? Muchas familias se encuentran en la misma situación.
Esperamos que esta guía aligere su carga y le ayude a tomar decisiones escolares que satisfagan sus necesidades. En su interior encontrará consejos prácticos, recursos y herramientas para usar durante la pandemia y más allá.
Abstract in English: Are you still trying to figure out how to support your child’s learning in a way that is safe and works for your child and family? Many families are in the same situation.
We hope this guide lightens your load and helps you make schooling decisions that meet your needs. Inside you will find practical tips, resources, and tools for use during the pandemic and beyond