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Health Justice Is Racial Justice: A Legal Action Agenda For Health Disparities
Get PDFAcknowledging the urgency of both health and racial justice in this moment, Sheila Foster, Yael Cannon, and M. Gregg Bloche set forth a legal agenda to fight the health effects of racism in housing, policing, the environment, and other areas
Rationing Safe and Effective COVID-19 Vaccines: Allocating to States Proportionate to Population May Undermine Commitments to Mitigating Health Disparities
Get PDFA central goal in the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine’s (NASEM) framework for equitable COVID-19 vaccine allocation is to mitigate existing inequities, particularly those affecting economically worse-off racial and ethnic minorities. The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practice (ACIP) likewise notes that equity demands to “reduce, rather than increase, health disparities in each phase of vaccine distribution”. A crucial question in this regard is how vaccines should be distributed to states. The default is to allocate proportionate to population size. However, this approach risks increasing scarcity for worse-off populations in states where they represent above-average shares. To avoid lower odds of receiving a vaccine for worse-off groups, more vaccines could be given to states with larger shares of worse-off populations, and fewer to ones with smaller shares. We show here the consequences of allocating by these two different approaches
The Stellenbosch Consensus on Legal National Responses to Public Health Risks: Clarifying Article 43 of the International Health Regulations
Get PDFThe International Health Regulations (IHR), of which the World Health Organization is custodian, govern how countries collectively promote global health security, including prevention, detection, and response to global health emergencies such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Countries are permitted to exercise their sovereignty in taking additional health measures to respond to such emergencies if these measures adhere to Article 43 of this legally binding instrument. Overbroad measures taken during recent public health emergencies of international concern, however, reveal that the provision remains inadequately understood. A shared understanding of the measures legally permitted by Article 43 is a necessary step in ensuring the fulfillment of obligations, and fostering global solidarity and resilience in the face of future pandemics. In this consensus statement, public international law scholars specializing in global health consider the legal meaning of Article 43 using the interpretive framework of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties
The Future (Public Company Boardroom) Is Female: From California SB 826 to a Gender Diversity Listing Standard
Get PDFThe World Health Organization in Global Health Law
Get PDFThe World Health Organization (WHO) has sought to bring the world together to respond to a shared threat. This column seeks to examine the central importance of WHO in developing and implementing global health law. Recognizing that global health law requires global governance, the column begins by situating WHO’s role at the forefront of global health governance. WHO’s leadership in global governance for health is supported by an expansive mandate to serve as a forum for the codification of international law, which WHO has exercised sporadically through the evolving development of the International Health Regulations (IHR). Yet, where the IHR have proven incommensurate to the COVID-19 challenge, WHO now finds itself at a crossroads, with this column considering a range of reforms that may be proposed in the years to come
“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall:” A Reflection on the Constitutional Vulnerabilities of the Southwest Border Wall
Get PDFTailoring Election Regulation: The Platform Is the Frame
Get PDFAccording to conventional wisdom, legislative efforts to limit platform-based electoral manipulation—including especially laws that go beyond simply mandating additional disclosure about advertising expenditures—are most likely doomed to swift judicial invalidation. In this Essay, I bracket questions about baseline First Amendment coverage and focus on the prediction of inevitable fatality following strict scrutiny. Legislation aimed at electoral manipulation rightly confronts serious concerns about censorship and chilling effects, but the ways that both legislators and courts approach such legislation will also be powerfully influenced by framing choices that inform assessment of whether challenged legislation is responsive to claimed harms and appropriately tailored to the interests it assertedly serves. I identify three frames conventionally employed in evaluating the design of speech regulation—the distribution bottleneck, the rational listener, and the intentional facilitator—and explain why each is ill-suited to the platform-based information environment, which presents different incentives and failure modes. In their place, I offer the platform itself as a new frame. I identify the harms and interests that frame brings into focus and offer some preliminary thoughts on the kinds of legislation it might permit
Asymmetric Stakes in Antitrust Litigation
Get PDFPrivate antitrust litigation often involves a dominant firm being accused of exclusionary conduct by a smaller rival or entrant. Importantly, the firms in such cases generally have asymmetric stakes: the defendant typically has a much larger financial interest on the line. We explore the broad policy implications of this fact using a novel model of litigation with endogenous effort. Asymmetric stakes lead dominant defendants to invest systematically more resources into litigation, causing the plaintiff\u27s success probability to fall below the efficient level--a distortion that carries over to ex ante settlements. We explain that enhanced damages may reduce the problem, but cannot eliminate it. We also show that, in most areas of private law, asymmetric stakes do not distort litigation outcomes in this way; the distortion arises in antitrust only because it proscribes certain ex post settlements, and this constraint influences incentives at the litigation stage. Finally, we consider how courts could correct the distortion created by asymmetric stakes by altering plaintiffs\u27 evidentiary burden
The Equitable Distribution of COVID-19 Therapeutics and Vaccines
No full textScientists from across the globe are racing to develop effective vaccines and therapeutics for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Plans are beginning to emerge for ensuring the equitable worldwide distribution of vaccines and therapeutics resulting from biomedical innovations. Absent broad agreement and buy-in on those plans, governments may prioritize their own populations, resulting in inequitable distribution of medical products both within and among countries. During the 2009 influenza A(H1N1) pandemic, wealthy nations bought virtually all vaccine supplies. Even after the WHO appealed for donations, supplies for low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) were limited. The White House may have already sought exclusive access to a COVID-19 vaccine candidate. European and Asian countries have imposed export controls on personal protective equipment and ventilators, with similar export controls likely to extend to COVID-19 vaccine and therapeutic stocks.The development and widespread distribution of COVID-19 medical treatments are a common global interest. Here we offer a proposal for global cooperation to ensure equitable distribution of vaccines and therapies for COViD-19
Stone Monuments and Flexible Laws: Removing Confederate Monuments Through Historic Preservation Laws
Get PDFThis essay is a comment on an article by Jess Phelps and Jessica Owley, Etched in Stone: Historic Preservation Law and Confederate Monuments, published last year by the Florida Law Review. Contrary to their claims, historic preservation law does not seriously impede the removal or contextualization of Confederate memorials. The tangled and toxic heritage they signify does. The law rather creates the context within which parties contend about the meaning and continuing value of these monuments. Preservation law is not so much “etched in stone,” as a living requirement that we collectively, carefully address what remnants of the past to retain and what to discard