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Using One Dying Regime to Save Another
Get PDFCannabis reforms are proliferating. A handful of nations have already legalized the drug for recreational purposes, and several more may soon follow suit. These national cannabis reforms are generating bottom-up pressure to liberalize the transnational legal order (TLO) for cannabis prohibition, one that involves not only international law, but also domestic law and regulatory practice. Based on a trio of international conventions, this TLO currently requires member states to limit access to marijuana, especially for non-medical or non-scientific purposes. But even as it comes under attack from below, the existing cannabis prohibition TLO may be exerting its own downward pressure on national cannabis policies. This essay uses a timely case study involving the United States’ marijuana research policy to explore the two-way relationship between international law and national cannabis policies in the dynamics of transnational legal ordering. It highlights an overlooked way the international conventions are currently helping to stifle national cannabis reforms, and it discusses the possible ramifications of that top-down pressure for the future of the cannabis prohibition TLO
Pricing the Global Health Risks of the COVID-19 Pandemic
Get PDFPolicies to address the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) require a balancing of the health risk reductions and the costs of economic dislocations. Application of the value of a statistical life (VSL) to monetize COVID-19 deaths produces a U.S. mortality cost estimate of 3.5 trillion. The United States accounts for 25% of the deaths, but 41% of the mortality cost. Adjustments for the shorter life expectancy and lower income of the victims substantially reduces the estimated monetized losses, but may raise fundamental equity concerns. Morbidity effects of COVID-19 affect many more patients than do the disease’s mortality risks. Consideration of the morbidity effects increase the expected health losses associated with COVID-19 illnesses by 10% to 40%
Catastrophic Risk: Waking Up to the Reality of a Pandemic?
Get PDFWill a major shock awaken the US citizens to the threat of catastrophic pandemic risk? Using a natural experiment administered both before and after the 2014 West African Ebola Outbreak, our evidence suggests “no.” Our results show that prior to the Ebola scare, the US citizens were relatively complacent and placed a low relative priority on public spending to prepare for a pandemic disease outbreak relative to an environmental disaster risk (e.g., Fukushima) or a terrorist attack (e.g., 9/11). After the Ebola scare, the average citizen did not over-react to the risk. This flat reaction was unexpected given the well-known availability heuristic—people tend to over-weigh judgments of events more heavily toward more recent information. In contrast, the average citizen continued to value pandemic risk less relative to terrorism or environmental risk
Electronic Cigarette Risk Beliefs and Usage After the Vaping Illness Outbreak
Get PDFNew national survey evidence on electronic cigarette (e-cigarette) risk beliefs indicates that people substantially overestimate the health risks posed by e-cigarettes, both in absolute terms and relative to conventional cigarette risk beliefs. Perceptions of the lung cancer risks and total mortality risks of conventional cigarettes function as prior risk beliefs for e-cigarettes. People believe e-cigarettes are at least 60% as risky as conventional cigarettes. Whether respondents have seen reports of vaping-related illnesses has no significant effect on risk beliefs, but there has been a modest increase in the percentage who believe that e-cigarettes are riskier than cigarettes. Accurate e-cigarette beliefs would significantly increase whether people try, currently use, or exclusively use e-cigarettes. Whereas price and taste are the principal drivers of brand choice for conventional cigarettes, use of e-cigarettes is more closely linked to smoking cessation and concern with environmental tobacco smoke
Chancery Court Finds Merger Agreement Preserved Sellers\u27 Privilege over Pre-Merger Attorney-Client Communication
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Chancery Court Rejects Target Company Claim That Termination Fee Was Jilted Merger Partner\u27s Exclusive Remedy
Get PDFChancery Court Dismisses Breach of Fiduciary Duty Claims against Target Company Directors Despite Unavailability of Corwin Defense
Get PDFCorporate Law and Social Risk
Get PDFOver a quarter of total assets under management are now invested in socially responsible companies. This turn to sustainability has gained solid ground over the last few years, earning the commitment of hundreds of CEOs and dominating the global business agenda. This marks an astounding repudiation of Wall Street’s get-rich-quick mentality, as well as a direct challenge to corporate law’s reigning mantra of profit maximization above all. But corporate law scholars are skeptical about the rise of sustainability. Some scoff at companies’ promises to “do the right thing” as empty rhetoric. But companies are revisiting core business practices and adjusting central governance mechanisms, such as executive compensation, to reward improvements in sustainability performance. For other theorists, directors and officers beholden to shareholder primacy can opt for sustainability only as long as it also maximizes profits. While doctrinally straightforward, this approach is highly problematic in practice. The wide range of issues nurtured under the sustainability movement—ranging from environment and climate, to diversity and other workplace concerns, to privacy and supply chain management—do not always lend themselves readily to a profit-maximizing logic and are often costly in the short term.
We offer a new solution to this quandary. We argue that, through their sustainability initiatives, companies are looking primarily for safeguards against downside risks, and not simply for opportunities to increase their profits. Social risk has proven highly destructive for corporate value even when the company’s key failure is not violating laws, as the recent crises at Facebook and Uber demonstrate. Sustainability can help avoid such crises because it provides corporate boards with input from stakeholders such as employees, NGOs, local authorities, and regulatory agencies. These stakeholders are uniquely placed to register the impact of company policies on the ground and can communicate concerns early. Contrasting sustainability with compliance, the only risk monitoring mechanism sanctioned in our laws, we note distinct advantages. While compliance’s scope is tethered to legal violations, sustainability encourages intervention even when laws have not caught up. Compliance’s emphasis on detection and punishment distorts management’s incentives and incites fears of retribution in stakeholders. Rather than dwelling on the past, sustainability builds a new vision for the future hoping to inspire and gain trust.
We base our account of sustainability on interviews and roundtable discussions with over three hundred participants, including leading public and private companies, large asset managers, investors and pension funds, shareholder advisory firms, and sustainability standard setters and data providers. Our conversations confirm that it was investors who pushed hard for environmental and social initiatives, putting pressure on more reserved managers and boards. We argue that investors’ support for sustainability is precisely because it helps fight risks that are otherwise hard to diversify. Asset managers, in particular, who own significant positions in every U.S. public company, are exposed to industry-wide and market-wide risk and may suffer externalities from a company’s reckless behavior.
While investors have been early supporters, CEOs and executives are only recently opening up to sustainability, which continues to face some resistance in corporate boardrooms. We argue that directors’ and officers’ unwillingness to address social risk is a manifestation of agency conflicts. Averting crises is a thankless task, and boards have few incentives to undertake action without external pressure. Moreover, the intractability of many sustainability concerns, combined with management’s confidence in the company’s success, leads to systematically downplaying social risk. But by failing to establish an appropriate sustainability function, directors and managers are unnecessarily exposing their shareholders to increased risk. Boards should ensure that their company has a well-running sustainability function with proper board oversight that reaches out to stakeholders relevant to the company’s business. This governance reform, we conclude, is essential to allow sustainability to reach its full potential
The Machine as Author
Get PDFMachines are increasingly good at emulating humans and laying siege to what has been a strictly human outpost: intellectual creativity.
At this juncture, we cannot know with certainty how high machines will reach on the creativity ladder when compared to, or measured against, their human counterparts, but we do know this. They are far enough already to force us to ask a genuinely hard and complex question, one that intellectual property (“IP”) scholars and courts will need to answer soon; namely, whether copyrights should be granted to productions made not by humans but by machines.
This Article’s specific objective is to answer the question of whether autonomously created AI machine productions in the literary and artistic field (that is, prima facie copyrightable subject matter) should be protected by copyright