3320 research outputs found
Sort by
Vaccine Politics: Law and Inequality in the Pandemic Response to COVID-19
Get PDFInternational mechanisms failed to achieve equitable distribution of COVID-19 vaccines—prolonging and deepening the pandemic. To understand why, we conduct process tracing of the first year of international policymaking on vaccine equity. We find that, in the absence of a single venue for global negotiation, two competing law and policy paradigms emerged. One focused on demand and voluntary action by states and firms, while the alternative focused on opening knowledge and expanding production through national and international law. While these could have been complementary, power inequalities between key actors kept the second paradigm from gaining traction on the global agenda. The failure of the prevailing policy paradigm to secure equity is explained, not by unforeseen technical and financing challenges as some suggest, but by a fundamental misalignment with the political environment. While norm entrepreneurs encouraged sharing, political incentives pushed governments towards securing and hoarding doses. Firms responded to the latter. Mechanisms like COVAX proved incapable of countering these predictable international and domestic political forces. Earlier funding would not likely have changed the behaviour of states or firms in the absence of legal commitment. Barring significant geopolitical changes, a shift to include open/supply-focused policies will be necessary to achieve equity in future pandemics
A critical juncture for human rights in global health: Strengthening human rights through global health law reforms
Get PDFThe 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), establishing a human rights foundation under the United Nations (UN), has become a cornerstone of global health, central to public health policies throughout the world. As the world commemorates the 75th anniversary of the UDHR on 10 December, this “Human Rights Day” celebration arrives at a critical juncture for human rights in global health, raising an imperative for World Health Organization (WHO) reforms to strengthen the right to health and health-related human rights
Making the World Safer and Fairer in Pandemics
Get PDFGlobal health has long been characterized by injustice, with certain populations marginalized and made vulnerable by social, economic, and health disparities within and among countries. The pandemic only amplified inequalities. In response to it, the World Health Organization and the United Nations have embarked on transformative normative and financial reforms that could reimagine pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response (PPPR). These reforms include a new strategy to sustainably finance the WHO, a UN political declaration on PPPR, a fundamental revision to the International Health Regulations, and negotiation of a new, legally binding pandemic agreement (popularly called the “Pandemic Treaty”). We revisit the cavernous shortcomings of the global Covid-19 response, explain potentially transformative legal reforms and the ethical values that underpin them, and propose actionable solutions to advance both health and justice
Leveraging Academic-Medical Legal Partnerships to Advance Health Justice
Get PDFUnmet legal needs contribute to housing, income, and food insecurity, along with other conditions that harm health and drive health inequity. Addressing health injustice requires new tools for the next generations of lawyers, doctors, and other healthcare professionals. An interprofessional group of co-authors argue that law and medical schools and other university partners should develop and cultivate Academic Medical-Legal Partnerships (A-MLPs), which are uniquely positioned to leverage service, education, and research resources, to advance health justice
The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and the Partnerships of Equitable Vaccine Access
Get PDFThis article highlights and evaluates the role of CEPI and its contribution to global equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines through its established partnerships for vaccine development. The article adds to the understanding of how and when such partnerships can work for public health, especially under emergency citations. The relatively spontaneous and effective cooperation between major international organizations shortly after the pandemic declaration played a significant role in reducing to a material extent COVID-19’s burden of disease and death. Future pandemic preparedness, prevention, and response will require that collaborations of this kind be sustained and effective going forward
Problems With Authority
Get PDFJudicial decisionmaking rests on a foundation of unwritten rules—those that govern the weight of authority. Such rules, including the cornerstone principle of stare decisis, are created informally through the internal social practices of the judiciary. Despite the central role of such rules in judicial decisionmaking, we lack a good account of how they are created, revised, and enforced. There is something paradoxical and troubling about the notion that the rules of the game are determined by the players as they play the game according to those rules. Because weight-of-authority rules are largely informal and almost entirely unwritten, we don’t even have a comprehensive account of their content. This raises serious questions—sounding in due process and access to justice—about whether judicial decisionmaking rests ultimately on judges’ arbitrary and unexamined preferences rather than transparent and deliberative processes.I surface this evolving set of rules as a complex body of judicial norms that extends well beyond the principle of stare decisis. Using an original data set, I examine norms and practices in the Tenth Circuit as a case study. I reveal norms of authority that are largely invisible to all—including parties appearing before the courts—and illustrate some of the consequences of a decentralized informal rule-making system. These norms govern the construction of every judicial decision, but they are not the product of design. As a whole, this body of norms—a foundational set of unwritten insiders’ rules created without deliberation by an elite set of judges—is both problematic and surprisingly unexamined. This article exposes the problem and considers possible avenues of reform, advocating for transparency as a critical first step in addressing the problems with authority
Defeating the Economic Theory of Copyright: How the Natural Right to Seek Knowledge is the Only Theory Able to Explain the Entirety of Copyright’s Balance
Get PDFThe practice of copyright was once a perfect balance, reflecting the intent of the Founders to create an environment where new works were constantly made available to the public for consumption and use. The author would create a work, a user would buy a copy and be free to use it. Neither party had any right to interfere with the other’s activities. All of that changed with newer technologies, exposing the flaws both in our laws and the applications of them.
Copyright laws, on their face, prohibit many normal uses of copyrighted works by end users, such as making mixed tapes, converting LPs to mp3s, and playing music at a piano recital. But for the better part of two centuries, the end uses of copyrighted works were treated by the public, Congress, and courts as free from copyright’s purview. On the few occasions where a lawsuit was filed and the defendant felt that their use was the type which copyright was not intended to impact, they would assert a claim in equity, judges would make decisions on a case-by-case basis, and in that way, the early body of fair use law developed.Those judge-made principles were eventually codified in 17 U.S.C. §107.
Despite the equitable intent of fair use, it is now analyzed primarily as a matter of law and based on economic theory. This conservative take on fair use carried relatively few costs when infringement litigation was primarily between commercial actors and about for-profit uses, but as newer technologies emerged (e.g., photocopier, home recording devices, the web), the attacks have turned to individuals and non-profit entities for non-profit uses that were once considered immune from the copyright owner’s control.
The stakes in fair use litigation are therefore higher today than they have been in years past, potentially resulting in real harm to all. Any continued insistence on viewing fair use as a matter of law and economics only increases the jeopardy, as the value of copyright for society has nothing to do with financial interests. The balance of copyright has meaning beyond the laws in which any nation has embodied it, and for that reason, current attempts to exploit copyright in opposition to those principles should be challenged. This paper will put forth the argument that there remains a separate, equitable, common law claim for the use of knowledge that survives despite fair use’s codification in §107
\u3ci\u3eHachette\u3c/i\u3e, Controlled Digital Lending, and the Consequences of Divorcing Law From Context
Get PDFThis article will look at the recent Hachette decision against the Internet Archive, analyzing how the court’s reliance on past authorities with insufficient context distorted their meanings. It will focus only on the controlled digital lending (CDL) aspect, not discussing the other claims in the suit or exploring the specific implementation of CDL by the Internet Archive (IA). Since CDL programs can vary widely, IA is better situated than others to identify missing context related to the analysis of the unique components of their efforts. And other libraries engaging in CDL should be able to easily see where their programs differ from the judge’s description of IA’s. For that reason, the analysis below only delves into the language that might be used to chill all CDL programs or innovation more generally
Does the 1L Curriculum Make a Difference?
Get PDFGeorgetown Law’s Curriculum B (also known as Section 3) offers a unique opportunity to study an alternative 1L curriculum. The standard 1L curriculum has been around for decades and is still offered at the vast majority of U.S. law schools. Leaders in the legal academy often talk about experimenting with the 1L curriculum, but hardly anyone does it. Georgetown Law has. We study whether Georgetown’s Curriculum B yields measurable differences in student outcomes. Our empirical design leverages the fact that enrollment in Curriculum B is done by lottery when it is oversubscribed—meaning our study is effectively a randomized controlled trial. We measure treatment effects of Curriculum B by comparing outcomes of students who received the treatment (Curriculum B) with outcomes of students who received the placebo (Curriculum A) but wanted the treatment. Because students in both the treatment and control groups elected to enroll in Curriculum B, our empirical design overcomes the issue of selection bias. We find that taking Curriculum B decreases students’ performance in two business law electives (Corporations and Securities Regulation) and reduces the rate at which they graduate with Latin honors. In addition, we find that it increases students’ propensity to take certain public law electives and decreases their propensity to take certain business law electives. We further find that taking Curriculum B decreases students’ likelihood of working in the private sector (law firm or business/industry), increases their likelihood of working in the public sector (government or public interest) or doing a judicial clerkship, and reduces their average annual salary. At the same, however, we find no statistically significant effects on other outcomes, including students’ cumulative GPA, their chances of passing the bar exam or being employed 10 months after graduation, or their rate or amount of alumni giving