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Requiring Human Papilloma Virus Vaccination for School Entry
Get PDFOver 40,000 Americans are diagnosed as having HPV-associated cancer each year, including oropharyngeal cancer for men and cervical cancer for women. These diseases cause significant morbidity and mortality and are largely preventable if people are vaccinated against HPV before they are exposed to the virus. Unfortunately, despite strong evidence of safety and effectiveness of the HPV vaccine, vaccination rates have been disappointingly low – much lower than for the varicella, measles, mumps, rubella, and hepatitis B. The disparity in vaccination rates stem mainly from the fact that HPV vaccination is not universally required for school entry, while the other childhood vaccines are required.
In this Viewpoint, we argue that now is the time to mandate HPV vaccination for school entry, and we provide several reasons to support our call to action. First, HPV vaccination is in children’s best interests. Second, while parents should be afforded considerable autonomy in raising their children, law and ethics do not support parents making health-related decisions that are contrary to their child’s best interests. Third, HPV vaccination is a form of social solidarity, and ought to protect ourselves and our neighbors from preventable disease and death. Finally, mandating vaccination will bring greater health equity, since racial minorities and those without health insurance suffer disproportionately from cervical cancer and other HPV-associated diseases. We believe the time for action is long overdue and call on state legislatures to enact HPV vaccination mandates linked to school entry, like with other childhood vaccines
Legal capacities required for prevention and control of noncommunicable diseases
Get PDFLaw lies at the centre of successful national strategies for prevention and control of noncommunicable diseases. By law we mean international agreements, national and subnational legislation, regulations and other executive instruments, and decisions of courts and tribunals. However, the vital role of law in global health development is often poorly understood, and eclipsed by other disciplines such as medicine, public health and economics. This paper identifies key areas of intersection between law and noncommunicable diseases, beginning with the role of law as a tool for implementing policies for prevention and control of leading risk factors. We identify actions that the World Health Organization and its partners could take to mobilize the legal workforce, strengthen legal capacity and support effective use of law at the national level. Legal and regulatory actions must move to the centre of national noncommunicable disease action plans. This requires high-level leadership from global and national leaders, enacting evidence-based legislation and building legal capacities
Estimating Risk Preferences in the Field
Get PDFWe survey the literature on estimating risk preferences using field data. We concentrate our attention on studies in which risk preferences are the focal object and estimating their structure is the core enterprise. We review a number of models of risk preferences—including both expected utility (EU) theory and non-EU models—that have been estimated using field data, and we highlight issues related to identification and estimation of such models using field data. We then survey the literature, giving separate treatment to research that uses individual-level data (e.g., property insurance data) and research that uses aggregate data (e.g., betting market data). We conclude by discussing directions for future research
Big Food and Soda Versus Public Health: Industry Litigation Against Local Government Regulations to Promote Healthy Diets
Get PDFDiets high in fats, sugars, and sodium are contributing to alarming levels of obesity, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and certain cancers throughout the United States. Sugary drinks, which include beverages that contain added caloric sweeteners such as flavored milks, fruit drinks, sports drinks, and sodas, are the largest source of added sugar in the American diet and an important causative factor for obesity and other diet-related diseases.
City and county governments have emerged as key innovators to promote healthier diets, adopting menu labeling laws to facilitate informed choices and soda taxes, warnings labels, and a soda portion cap to discourage consumption. These measures raise tension between the public health promotion and the food and beverage industry’s interests in maximizing profits. This article analyzes the food and beverage industry’s efforts to undermine local government nutrition promotion measures, including lobbying, funding scientific research, public messaging, and litigation. It examines four case studies (New York City’s soda portion cap, San Francisco’s soda warnings ordinance, and soda taxes in Philadelphia and Cook County), and distills steps that local governments can take to address industry opposition and help ensure the legal viability and political sustainability of key public health interventions
The Case for More Debt: Expanding College Affordability By Expanding Income-Driven Repayment
Get PDFIncome-Driven Repayment (IDR) for federal student loans is rapidly becoming the primary tool that the federal government uses to provide progressive funding to individuals to pay for college. Under these programs, borrowers can choose to pay back their loans as a percentage of income, with eventual debt forgiveness after 10-25 years. If administered well, these programs can make student loans affordable for everyone, regardless of income. In this symposium essay, I argue that for IDR to meet its goal of providing affordable higher education to everyone, the federal government needs to raise the individual borrowing limits on Direct Loans and issue substantially more debt than it does today. This perhaps counterintuitive proposal—help students by increasing debt—follows from the observation that an IDR student loan is conceptually not at all like traditional debt and is more akin to a tax instrument. If a borrower promises only to pay a percentage of income, the nominal amount of the debt is not as crucial. Furthermore, if a student cannot cover net tuition with federal student loans, the student may be forced to use private loans or to work excessively, which can lead to worse outcomes
Adolf Berle During the New Deal: The Brain Truster as an Intellectual Jobber
Get PDFThirty-seven year old law professor Adolf Berle had a career year in 1932. His book published that year, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (written with Gardiner Means), framed the fundamental twentieth century change in understanding modern corporations. Berle’s exchange with Merrick Dodd on the purpose of the corporation that played out that spring on the pages of the Harvard Law Review launched a still fierce debate over the role of shareholders and other stakeholders. His service as a brain truster for Franklin Roosevelt during the fall election gave voice to the transformative economic policies of the New Deal. This article looks at what came next, particularly Berle’s career development and policy impact during the twelve years of the Roosevelt administration. Somewhat surprisingly, he didn’t join the government for its first five years, and when he eventually moved to Washington it was for a job in the State Department. This exploration of his role between 1933 and 1945 reveals a driving force of these career choices—his strong affinity (evidenced not just in this period but in the time before and after) to work as a brain truster. What that meant to Berle was to be an intellectual jobber and free-lancer, taking on a series of important tasks, often suggesting big ideas, before moving on to the next challenge. Part II takes a deep dive into the planning for post-war international economic policy that commenced immediately after World War II broke out in Europe in 1939, not long after Berle had joined the State Department, and in which he was assigned a key role. This examination provides a fuller picture of the process leading to new international institutions in trade, monetary policy, and assembling global capital while at the same time illustrating the familiar characteristics of Berle as an intellectual jobber
The Battle to Define Asia’s Intellectual Property Law: From TPP to RCEP
Get PDFA battle is under way to decide the intellectual property law for half the world’s population. A trade agreement that hopes to create a free trade area even larger than that forged by Genghis Khan will define intellectual property rules across much of Asia and the Pacific. The sixteen countries negotiating the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) include China, India, Japan, and South Korea, and stretch to Australia and New Zealand. A review of a leaked draft reveals a struggle largely between India on one side and South Korea and Japan on the other over the intellectual property rules that will govern much of the world. The result of this struggle will affect not only access to innovation in the Asia-Pacific, but also across Africa and other parts of the world that depend on generic medicines from India, which has been called the “pharmacy to the developing world.” Surprisingly, the agreement that includes China as a pillar may result in stricter intellectual property rights than those mandated by the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Perhaps even more surprisingly, such TRIPS-plus rights will be available in the RCEP states to the United States and European companies equally by somewhat recondite provisions in TRIPS. In sum, the RCEP draft erodes access to medicines and education across much of the world
Multilateral Economic Institutions and U.S. Foreign Policy: Hearing Before the Subcomm. on Multilateral Int\u27l Dev., Multilateral Insts., & Int\u27l Econ., Energy, & Envtl. Pol\u27y of the S. Comm. on Foreign Relations, 115th Cong., Nov. 27, 2018 (Statement of Jennifer A. Hillman)
Get PDFVirtually every major international gathering of world leaders recently has ended in failure—or at least failure to reach enough agreement to issue a concluding statement or communique. These failures come at a time when many have been looking for signs that world leaders would come together to address the most pressing problems facing the world—including climate change, the breakdown in the rules of the international trading system, the need everywhere for good jobs that pay a living wage, and rapidly growing income inequality.
The failure of these meetings to produce formal agreements—or even specific paths to reaching agreements in the future—despite the high stakes has left many questioning the ability of the world’s leaders to meet global challenges, shedding a spotlight on the institutions and fora that were established for the purpose of achieving multilateral solutions—particularly the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The failure to reach agreements can best be seen as part of a long-term trend toward increased complexity in the world that makes it nearly impossible to reach traditional multilateral binding accords, combined with a waning of faith on the part of many countries in multilateralism and multilateral institutions.
A number of clear trends emerge from the failures to reach accords at virtually all recent international gatherings:
1) Government policies and international arrangements for collective decision-making have not kept pace with changes in the world, especially the high degree of international economic integration and interdependence.
Much of the increasing complexity in the international economic order stems from the explosive growth in the number and size of multinational corporations and financial institutions, many of which now dwarf the size of most of the nations in the world. Added to the complexity is the increase in the speed at which goods, money and technology moves around the globe in our digital age.
2) Learning to operate in this vastly more complex world will require more multilateralism, not less. As countries emerged from the era of colonialization and began opening their markets, the number of players on global stage increased, making reaching consensus among a much larger group of disparate interests more difficult. But because the most significant problems facing the world cross many international boundaries, solving them will require that countries come together to find regional, plurilateral, or global solutions.
3) It is essential that the international economic institutions be updated and improved, not destroyed or left to wither.
Because it is clear that reaching major new binding accords or creating new international institutions is quite difficult, the best and most achievable solution is to renovate our existing institutions. Each needs to modernize and improve their governance structures to ensure that work can get done despite the increases in complexities and to update their mandates to ensure the ability to address the problems of the 21st century, many of which are quite different from those that existed in the 1940s when these institutions were created.
Given that the crisis is most acute at the WTO, this testimony will focus on what must be done to renovate the World Trade Organization and why doing so is critical, both for the trading system and for the continued existence of a rules-based international economic order. The need for the WTO and its dispute settlement system to remain viable is particularly critical if we are to address the challenges presented by the explosive growth of China and its transformation into the largest exporter of goods in the world
Legal History as Economic History
No full textLegal History as Economic History surveys the current state of scholarship on the border between legal and economic history, describing the major questions asked by recent scholarship and pointing out directions for future research. The chapter identifies the key concerns that have guided much of the work in this field and describes two theoretical frameworks available to legal historians for conceptualizing the relationship between law and economy. It concludes that future work on the history of political economy should put aside the time-worn project of measuring the impact of law on economy (and vice versa) and instead explore how the boundary between law and economy has been constructed and maintained over time. Throughout, the chapter draws on examples from recent scholarship
National Security Lawyering: The Best View of the Law as a Regulative Ideal
Get PDFIn The National Security Lawyer in Crisis: When the “Best View” of the Law May Not Be the Best View, Robert Bauer describes the challenges for executive branch lawyers providing advice during a national security crisis. Bauer focuses on two especially perilous episodes in United States history—the Cuban Missile Crisis and the run-up to U.S. involvement in World War II—and analyzes the legal advice Presidents Kennedy and Roosevelt, respectively, received. In both cases, widely respected lawyers gave legal advice that supported the President’s preferred outcome, but almost certainly did not represent what the lawyers considered the best view of the law.
The “best view” model of lawyering appears to have no formal or widely recognized definition, either in Bauer’s article or elsewhere in the literature. Perhaps the best articulation of the concept is in the memorandum that sets out the “best practices” for the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), which directs OLC lawyers to “provide advice based on [their] best understanding of what the law requires—not simply an advocate’s defense of the contemplated action or position proposed by an agency or the Administration.” In rendering this advice, they must seek “to provide an accurate and honest appraisal of applicable law, even if that appraisal will constrain the Administration’s or an agency’s pursuit of desired practices or policy objectives.”
Bauer takes a dim view of this best view model, which he considers rigid, disconnected from important policy context, and unworkable in a crisis. Bauer proposes an exception to the best view approach for lawyers facing a national security crisis. Lawyers under those circumstances, he argues, should be free to provide alternative legal analysis that supports the preferred policy position, so long as it is credible and made in good faith.
Bauer’s proposal to create an exception to the best view standard for crises, however, risks compromising the quality of national security lawyering overall. National security lawyers in the Executive Branch practice in an environment without many of the formal and informal incentives for high-quality legal advice that are common in other fields. The stakes are unusually high, which increases pressure from policymakers. At the same time, there is less external oversight from the courts and Congress, and the secrecy of much of the subject matter makes peer and public input difficult. Because of these challenges, it is important to build into the process of developing national security legal advice as many protections for high-quality legal analysis as possible. The best view standard is such a protection, and a critical one.
The best view standard is important to high-quality national security lawyering not because it always results in an objectively “right” legal answer—that is not possible. Instead, the best view standard acts as a guidepost—a regulative ideal— for lawyers, reminding them of their distinctive role in the process and grounding them with an external professional standard. It serves as a counterweight to the inevitable pressures that these lawyers face. It also honors and upholds the unique responsibilities of Executive Branch lawyers to assist the President in carrying out his constitutional responsibility to see that the laws are faithfully executed. Bauer’s proposal to recognize a lower standard in crisis situations would subvert this protection