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The International Intellectual Property Commercialization Council’s 3rd Annual U.S. Conference: The State of Innovation in the Union
Get PDFThe International Intellectual Property Commercialization Council (“IIPCC”) presented its third annual policy conference at the United States Capitol on May 6, 2019. The conference’s theme explored the question of “what is the state of innovation in the United States?” Panelists included The Honorable Andrei Iancu – Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office; Dr. Carl J. Schramm – University Professor, Syracuse University and Former President of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation; Mr. Patrick Kilbride – Senior Vice President of the Global Innovation Policy Center (“GIPC”) at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; and Mr. Colman Ragan – Vice President and General Counsel, North America IP Litigation at Teva Pharmaceuticals, who all shared their perspectives on the state of innovation. A lead off panel including local entrepreneurs, intellectual property specialists, federal government specialists, and academics allowed this panel to provide a “boots on the ground” perspective
Capitalizing on Healthy Lawyers: The Business Case for Law Firms to Promote and Prioritize Lawyer Well-Being
Get PDFThis Article is the first to make the business case for firms to promote and prioritize lawyer well-being. For more than three decades, quantitative research has demonstrated that lawyers suffer from depression, anxiety, and addiction far in excess of the general population. Since that time, there have been many calls within and outside the profession for changes to be made to promote, prioritize, and improve lawyer well-being, particularly because many aspects of the current law school and law firm models exacerbate mental health and addiction issues, as well as overall law student and lawyer distress. These calls for change, made on moral and humanitarian grounds, largely have been ignored; in fact, over the years the pervasiveness of mental health and addiction issues within the profession have persisted, if not increased. This Article argues that these moral- and humanitarian-based calls for change have gone unheeded because law firms have not had financial incentives to respond to them.
In making the business case for change, this Article argues that systemic changes designed to support and resources to lawyers will avoid costs associated with lawyer mental health and addiction issues and, more importantly, create efficiencies that will increase firms’ long-term financial stability and growth. It demonstrates that this business case is especially strong now in light of not only societal and generational factors, but also changes within the profession itself well. As firms have begun to take incremental steps to promote lawyer well-being, lasting and meaningful change will further benefit firms’ collective bottom lines as it will improve: (1) performance, as clients are demanding efficiency in the way their matters are staffed and billed; (2) retention, as that creates efficiencies and the continuous relationships demanded by clients; and (3) recruitment, particularly as younger millennial and Generation Z lawyers—who prioritize mental health and well-being—enter the profession
Rucho Is Right – But for the Wrong Reasons
Get PDFIn Rucho v. Common Cause, the Supreme Court ended its long struggle to formulate constitutional standards to regulate political gerrymandering by declaring that it was not up to the job. The Court held that it could come up with no manageable standards governing the controversy and that it therefore posed a nonjusticiable political question.
In this brief comment, I attempt defend this outcome. The task is not easy, and I hope that the reader will at least give me some points for degree of difficulty. There is no denying that partisan gerrymandering is a very serious evil and there is no defending Chief Justice Roberts’ dreadful opinion justifying the Court’s refusal to do anything about it. Still, I argue, on balance, we are better off without the Supreme Court mucking around with this problem. Moreover, the reasons why we are better off go beyond this particular issue and impeach some of the standard arguments for judicial intervention more generally
Redesigning Education Finance: How Student Loans Outgrew the “Debt” Paradigm
Get PDFThis Article argues that the student loan crisis is due not to the scale of student loan debt, but to the federal education finance system’s failure to utilize its existing mechanisms for progressive, income-based payments and debt cancellation. These mechanisms can make investment in higher education affordable to both individuals and the government, but they have not been fully utilized because of the mismatch between the current system’s economic reality and its legal, financial, and institutional apparatus.The current economic structure of federal student loans does not resemble a true credit product, but a government grant program coupled with a progressive, income-based tax on recipients. For example, federal direct loans do not require the full repayment of all principal and accrued interest. Instead, borrowers have the contractual right to satisfy their obligations by paying only a percentage of their income for a fixed period of time. Debt forgiveness is contractually baked into the federal student loan product.The education finance system, however, still relies on a legal, financial, and institutional apparatus based on “debt,” developed under the pre-2010 system, which was based on private loans backed by federal government guarantees, rather than the post-2010 system of direct federal lending with income-driven repayment. The frictions between the legacy legal, financial, and institutional “debt” apparatus and the economic reality of subsidized finance; progressive, income-driven repayment; and debt forgiveness are the source of nearly all of the problems in education finance, including high levels of default, abusive servicing, and even the very idea of a student debt crisis.It’s time to call federal student loans what they really are—a tuition grant plus an income surtax on students. To this end, this Article proposes a set of targeted reforms: automatic income-based payments using a graduated rate schedule; collection through tax withholding and return filing; and replacement of interest accrual with an inflation adjustment. Moving toward a grant-and-tax framework would facilitate substantial reforms to the financing of higher education and help ensure that instead of being a debt trap, federal financing facilitates affordable higher education
Kicked Out, Kicked Again: The Discharge Review Boards’ Illiberal Application of Liberal Consideration for Veterans with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Get PDFIn recent years, the Department of Defense (DoD) has responded to the growing awareness of mental health issues for military servicemembers during and after service. This Article focuses on veterans who have already been discharged from service, and specifically those who have been discharged under other-than-honorable conditions for misconduct that is likely the result of a mental health condition, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), traumatic brain injury, sexual assault, or sexual harassment. Thousands of former servicemembers have been kicked out of the military for misconduct rather than treated for mental health conditions they experienced due to their military service. When these veterans later seek an upgrade from a discharge review board based on their mental health conditions, they are typically kicked again when the discharge review board denies relief.
In 2014, DoD created a new policy to give “liberal consideration” to veterans seeking to upgrade their other-than-honorable discharges due to mental health conditions. The policy, known as the Hagel Memo, was later clarified and supplemented in August 2017 by the Kurta Memo. This Article analyzes how the Naval Discharge Review Board as a representative of the discharge review boards has implemented the guidance based on decisions released after the August 2017 Kurta Memo’s clarifying guidance.
This Article contributes to the discussion on military and veterans’ mental health issues through the lens of how the discharge upgrade process fails to respond to the growing understanding and awareness of PTSD and other mental health conditions. This Article explains how the discharge review boards have failed to implement the liberal consideration policy guidance and offers a path forward, from a big picture redefinition of “Honorable” to specific revisions to Navy procedures that serve as examples for all the services to consider. The discharge review boards have the opportunity to acknowledge that the military abandoned these veterans at the discharge stage when they received an other-than-honorable discharge and—more importantly—to provide relief by giving them a hand up rather than kicking them again
Health Policy in the Supreme Court and a New Conservative Majority
Get PDFThis Viewpoint looks at the range of medical and public health issues that could be adversely affected by appointment of Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the US Supreme Court, including weakening or elimination of the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid work requirements that could reduce eligibility, and reduced reproductive rights and governmental public health emergency powers
The Great Coronavirus Pandemic of 2020—7 Critical Lessons
Get PDFThe world is experiencing a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, causing untold human suffering and death, unraveling of social relationships, and robbing individuals of livelihoods and countries of prosperity. The coronavirus pandemic has strained health systems, revealed unconscionable inequalities, and upended international institutions. Here are 7 critical lessons
Introduction: Global Health and Human Rights
Get PDFThis introduction highlights the foundational importance of human rights for global health and provides an academic framework for this book by laying out the role of human rights under international law as a basis for public health. Part I seeks to define the evolving conceptualization of health, examining both the shifting focus from medicine to public health and the shifting response from international health to global health. Framing global health as a human rights imperative, Part II examines the establishment of human rights under international law, the implementation of these rights in public policy, and the development of rights for public health. With this development of human rights giving rise to the field of “health and human rights,” Part III explores the recent birth of this interdisciplinary field, creating a field of practice that now requires a formal academic foundation. Part IV describes the academic contribution of this foundation text to the field and outlines the structure of this comprehensive volume, delineating the chapters that describe the normative development, policy implementation, contemporary application, and new challenges in the field. This introduction concludes by reaffirming the inextricable linkages between health and human rights, calling on scholars, practitioners, and advocates to work together to advance human rights in global health
The Ratchet Wreck: Equality’s Leveling Down Problem
Get PDFConstitutional equality law has a two-way ratchet problem. When someone demonstrates that a government policy treats her unequally, the injury can be remedied by improving things for the claimant, but it can also be remedied by leaving the claimant’s status unchanged while making things worse for the people advantaged by the policy. If a court chooses the latter option, it diminishes the welfare of some people while arguably not improving welfare of anyone else. Why is that a good idea?
Courts have often attempted to avoid hard questions like these by leveling up – that is by allowing advantaged persons to keep their advantage and extending that advantage to the previously disadvantaged class. But not always and not lately. In two recent cases, the Court required the government to level down, and the Court’s opinions hint that it may do so more often in the future.
If one looks beyond these two cases, things are actually much worse. The first Part of this Article surveys the chaotic landscape. At various times, the Court has held or implied that: Courts faced with an equality claim must level up; Courts faced with an equality claim must level down; Courts faced with an equality claim may level up or down; Courts faced with an equality claim should guess whether Congress preferred leveling up or leveling down; When a federal court lacks the power to order a state to level up, it should dismiss the case; Because a court could theoretically level down, it should deny the equality claim entirely and therefore leave the original inequality undisturbed.
How might we clean up the mess? A promising strategy is to map various solutions onto the functions served by equality claims in the first place. Part Two undertakes that task. The problem is that the Justices have been unable to agree on and consistently apply a single, normative justification. The ratchet wreck is therefore epiphenomenal. It is an external manifestation of the Court’s confusion about the reasons for equality. Confusion about reasons unsurprisingly begets confusion in outcomes.
Part Three, concludes with the observation that our ratchet difficulties reflect a still deeper ambivalence about the equality requirement itself. The potential for downward ratchets is necessary to make that requirement meaningful, yet the seeming irrationality of this remedy obstructs a full-throated embrace of the equality norm
Equitable Allocation of COVID-19 Vaccines: An Analysis of the Initial Allocation Plans of CDC\u27s Jurisdictions with Implications for Disparate Impact Monitoring
Get PDFMajor global and national vaccine allocation guidelines urge planners to allocate vaccines in ways that recognize, and ideally reduce, existing societal inequities within countries. However, allocation plans of the US will be determined individually by each of the CDC’s 64 jurisdictions (states, the District of Columbia, five cities, and territories). We analyzed whether jurisdictions have incorporated novel approaches to reduce inequity, based on plans published by the CDC in early November 2020 (63 summaries [98% of all jurisdictions] and 47 full guidance documents [73% of all, including all 50 states]).
Eighteen states adopted a novel proposal to use a disadvantage index to allocate vaccines more equitably, for five types of equity goals: 1) to prioritize disadvantaged groups directly, 2) to define priority groups in phased systems, 3) to plan tailored outreach and communication, 4) to plan the location of dispensing sites and 5) to monitor uptake. Yet just over a third of all states, and only half of the 16 states with the largest shares of disadvantaged populations—where reducing inequity would be most urgent—pursue such goals.
While allocation frameworks are still evolving, the plans we analyzed mark important historical and practical benchmarks, and could become firm policy when COVID-19 vaccines are authorized and delivered. Vaccine roll-out poses unprecedented logistical and practical challenges. To minimize the risk that ethics and social justice falls by the wayside in the busy months to come, planners at the federal, state and local levels should carefully consider on what grounds they decline to adopt equity measures that other planners deem important and feasible for defining priority populations, designing allocation quotas, and just as critical, enabling, and monitoring, uptake