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Ting Ting Cheng Appointed as Director of Columbia Law School’s ERA Project
Get PDFNew York, New York — Today, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) Project at Columbia Law School announced that Ting Ting Cheng has been appointed as the Project’s first Director. Ms. Cheng has wide-ranging experience as an advocate for gender justice and brings an ambitious strategic vision to the ERA Project’s work
Fundamental 4: Pandemic Learning Reveals the Value of High-Quality Instructional Materials to Educator-Family-Student Partnerships
Get PDFThe COVID-19 pandemic caused enormous disruptions to PK-12 school systems, including long-held beliefs about teaching and learning. After several months of unexpected virtual and hybrid learning, some school systems have emerged with a new understanding of the instructional core. Commonly thought of as the relationships between teacher, student, and instructional materials that support student learning, these leaders have expanded their understanding of the instructional core to include families.
We conducted nearly 300 interviews with students, families, and educators from nine school districts and charter school organizations to learn more about the expanded instructional core. In Fundamental 4, we share four lessons key to sustaining the expanded core. These lessons are: Expand the required dimensions of “high-quality” instructional materials to be educative for families, tech-enabled, and culturally responsive Leverage high-quality instructional materials to coordinate academic co-production among the four anchors of the expanded core Sustain curriculum-based professional learning focused on the expanded core, with an explicit focus on implementing high-quality instructional materials in ways that respond to student, family, and community needs Create systems and structures for families, teachers, and students to design, monitor, and improve upon learning experience
Carbon Accounting by Public and Private Financial Institutions: Can We Be Sure Climate Finance Is Leading to Emissions Reductions?
Get PDFTo further and fully understand how to plan for the decarbonization of mining value chains, we need better data on carbon and other greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. However, neither consumers, corporates, or financial institutions know the embodied emissions in the products they produce or sell. While methods like life-cycle analysis and environmental product declarations exist, none use a verifiable, comparable, or widely adopted emissions reporting framework capable of sending supply chain signals.
To truly reform material supply chains, new solutions for markets, capital, and policy are required. COMET (the Coalition on Materials Emissions Transparency) – an alliance launched at Davos in January 2020 by CCSI, RockyMountain Institute, MIT’s Sustainable Supply Chains initiative, and the Colorado School of Mines – is creating a harmonized GHG calculation framework applicable to all mineral and industrial supply chains. To learn more about COMET, read: The three two-pagers on how COMET is working with financiers, producers, and buyers to create a harmonized GHG calculation framework. The blog How Much CO2 is Embedded in a Product? Toward an Emissions Calculation Framework for the Minerals Industry. The two-page policy brief The COMET Framework: Greenhouse Gas Data Transparency to Enable the Success of EU Climate Policy. The report, Comparison Between the IPCC Reporting Framework and Country Practice. This study examines national GHG inventories prepared by Australia, China, Germany, Japan, and the United States, and highlights how the inventories of different countries – though following the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories – reflect different choices of GHG accounting methodologies and approaches, emission factors, and categories and gases reported. These choices, allowed under the IPCC Guidelines, result in significant differences in reported GHG emissions, reinforcing the case for adopting a harmonized GHG accounting framework. The report Carbon Accounting by Public and Private Financial Institutions: Can We Be Sure Climate Finance Is Leading to Emissions Reductions? As reporting GHG emissions becomes mandatory in the financial sector, the methods by which emissions are calculated will grow in importance for their impact on the resulting metric. Progress is underway in both the public and private financial sectors to embed emissions accounting standards, but there is still a long way to go to make them universal and harmonized. This report addresses key developments that both multilateral development banks (MDBs) – major actors in public climate finance – and private financial institutions have made toward adopting and harmonizing methodologies for calculating financed emissions.
In June 2021, the Secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UN Climate Change) partnered with COMET to support the development of a harmonized GHG accounting framework
The Compensation Constraint and the Scope of the Takings Clause
Get PDFThe idea I wish to explore in this Essay is whether the established methods for determining just compensation can shed light on the meaning of other issues that arise in litigation under the Takings Clause. Specifically, is it possible to “reverse engineer” the Takings Clause by reasoning from settled understandings about how to determine just compensation in order to reach certain conclusions about when the Clause applies, what interests in private property are covered by the Clause, and what does it mean to take such property?
The proposed exercise is positive or descriptive in nature rather than normative. The hypothesis is that the ability to calculate just compensation, using established valuation techniques, is a necessary condition for finding that the Takings Clause applies. That the compensation constraint is a necessary condition for applying the Clause does not establish that it is a sufficient condition. There may be other factors, not addressed here, that enter into any final determination that government action gives rise to liability under the Clause. The Essay is concerned only with whether the ability to determine the amount of just compensation is a limiting principle on the scope of the constitutional right
Towards a Law of Inclusive Planning: A Response To “Fair Housing for a Non-Sexist City”
Get PDFNoah Kazis’s important article, Fair Housing for a Non-sexist City, shows how law shapes the contours of neighborhoods and embeds forms of inequality, and how fair housing law can provide a remedy. Kazis surfaces two dimensions of housing that generate inequality and that are sometimes invisible. Kazis highlights the role of planning and design rules – the seemingly identity-neutral zoning, code enforcement, and land-use decisions that act as a form of law. Kazis also reveals how gendered norms underlie those rules and policies. These aspects of Kazis’s project link to commentary on the often invisible, gendered norms that shape the design of ordinary objects, public space, data, and automated algorithms.
As to housing specifically, Kazis’s emphasis on gender is noteworthy; most examinations of exclusion in housing and land use concern race and class. Kazis takes up the invitation of Professor Dolores Hayden, a prominent urban historian, to imagine how we might redesign urban spaces and rethink the connection between the city and suburb. Kazis’s focus on “sex” means not just women as a broad category, but women who own businesses, participate in the wage economy, and need childcare zoned in their neighborhoods, as well as men who are low-income and need single-room occupancy (SRO) and other housing arrangements to make housing affordable
Fixing the Business of Food: Aligning Food Company Practices with the SDGs
Get PDFThe food sector confronts significant sustainable development challenges. It both contributes to, and suffers from, environmental degradation, especially human-induced climate change and deforestation. Although it can provide farming communities with livelihoods and incomes, it also can fuel land grabs that undermine community rights and wellbeing. The sector feeds the growing global population, but also contributes to the epidemics of obesity and metabolic diseases, while chronic malnutrition has continued to worsen in the years since adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
In light of these challenges and opportunities, a number of frameworks, guidance documents, and standards have aimed to create guidelines for more sustainable practices in the food industry. Yet, these tools lack industry consensus, and fall short of a holistic, comprehensive framework for responsible practices in the food sector that align with the SDGs.
In September 2021, the annual report Fixing the Business of Food: Aligning Food Company Practices with the SDGs was launched. The report contains an introduction to and overview of the Four Pillar Framework Standards. Detailed implementation guidance for food processing companies will follow in November 2021.
Under this project, the partners expect to engage with industry leaders, and to consult with representatives of key reporting standards, monitoring agencies, and academic disciplines to help build a consensus on best practices, reporting standards, and supply-chain monitoring to address the areas identified and highlighted in the report
Disability Admin: The Invisible Costs of Being Disabled
Get PDFThis Essay comes in five parts. After this Introduction, Part I begins by briefly sketching the concept of life admin and setting out the understanding of disability that informs the ADA. Part II demonstrates the special burdens that admin places on people with disabilities and uses this argument to refine the social model of disability and clarify its implications. This theoretical insight lays the groundwork for Part III to fill a gap in the analysis of “reasonable” accommodation under Title I. This Part shows that, although courts have set out a cost-benefit analysis as the framework for determining the “reasonableness” of an accommodation, they have neglected a significant input: the costs of disability admin. This Part also sketches several examples of the many other doctrinal consequences of recognizing disability admin: strengthening the analysis of “readily accessible” public services like transportation under Title II of the ADA,21 reframing the “vexatious litigant” who brings multiple lawsuits against public accommodations under Title III of the ADA, and broadening our understanding of “caring” under the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA). The final Part concludes
Propertied Rites
Get PDFThis Essay reviews Jack Rakove’s Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan’s Church State Corporation with an eye towards the complex management of religious property in U.S. constitutional doctrine. Part I summarizes Rakove’s book and highlights its value in the context of recent scholarship on early American legislative theory. Part II critiques Rakove’s turn from description towards advocacy of James Madison’s liberal protestant political theology. Part III summarizes Sullivan’s book as a particularly potent rebuttal to Rakove’s. Part IV takes up Sullivan’s method to consider the most recent crisis of religious property before the Supreme Court, that of government lockdowns in the Covid-19 pandemic. Part V concludes
The Promise and Peril of Local Election Administration
Get PDFThe administration of elections in the United States—including elections for federal office – is highly decentralized.
Fundamental election law decisions – such as registration and voter identification requirements, and early in-person voting and vote-by-mail rules – are made by the state legislature, but the actual conduct of elections is handled almost entirely by local governments.
Local officials register voters, process absentee ballot applications, design ballots, recruit and train poll workers, manage early voting and election day operations, acquire, maintain and secure voting equipment, and count, canvass, and report the results. In most states, local officials also pay for most of the costs
Nowhere to Run to, Nowhere to Hide
Get PDFAs the COVID-19 global pandemic ravaged the United States, exacerbating the country’s existing racial disparities, Black and brown small business owners navigated unprecedented obstacles to stay afloat. Adding even more hardship and challenges, the United States also engaged in a nationwide racial reckoning in the wake of the murder of George Floyd resulting in wide-scale protests in the same neighborhoods that initially saw a disproportionate impact of COVID-19 and harming many of the same Black and brown business owners. These business owners had to operate in an environment in which they experienced recurring trauma, mental anguish and uncertainty, along with physical destruction of many of their businesses and communities. This essay looks at how the generation-defining events of 2020 and the first half of 2021 affected the landscape of operating a small business, particularly for Black small business owners in Philadelphia and New York, where the authors run transactional law clinics at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and Columbia Law School. It goes on to describe how the pandemic and George Floyd protests affected their clinic students, clients, and themselves. The essay analyzes the events of the last year and a half in the historical context of past events of economic disruption and racial unrest. It concludes that a lasting impact of the COVID-19 pandemic will be the recognition of systemic racism and inequity that has persisted in American society for over 150 years and how it stunts Black and brown entrepreneurship