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The Ebola Epidemic: A Public Health Emergency of International Concern
Get PDFOn August 8, 2014, the World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Margaret Chan declared the West Africa Ebola crises a “public health emergency of international concern,” triggering powers under the 2005 International Health Regulations (IHR).
The most affected West African states have attempted classic public health measures with varied success, including quarantine and isolation, social distancing, risk communication, and travel restrictions. These have involved a trade off between population health and human rights; sometimes to the disadvantage of both. At the same time, the countries’ health systems and human resources are fragile, impeding an effective response.
Beyond the public health and humanitarian implications, this crisis has raised controversial ethical issues concerning the withholding or providing early access to investigational therapies, the preference given to foreign aid workers, and the disproportionate impact of Ebola on domestic health care workers.
The WHO director-general’s declaration of a public health emergency of international concern underscores the urgency of a coordinated international response and the imperative of raising the health systems capacity of low-income states. However, the current outbreak demonstrates how global governance has suffered from a lack of binding international commitment to sustainable capacity building and technical assistance in low-income states
Inside the \u3ci\u3eBlackwall\u3c/i\u3e Box: Explaining U.S. Marine Salvage Awards
Get PDFUnder U.S. maritime law, a salvor of imperiled maritime property on navigable waters is entitled to a monetary award from the owner. When the salvage service is rendered voluntarily in the absence of a contract, the court determines the salvage award according to six factors enumerated by the Supreme Court in The Blackwall, 77 U.S. 1 (1869). The law, however, does not specify a precise formula or rule for calculating awards on the basis of the Blackwall factors. How do courts turn their findings on the Blackwall factors into salvage awards? This article addresses this question by examining the reported decisions of U.S. courts in salvage cases from 1799 to 2007. It employs two statistical methods—fractional polynomial regression and regression tree analysis—to make inferences about the mapping from factors to awards implicit in the salvage cases. In addition to presenting the first systematic empirical study of U.S. marine salvage awards, which complements the traditional doctrinal analysis offered by maritime commentators, an important contribution of the article is that it showcases statistical methods that are well suited to empirical doctrinal analysis but are underutilized in legal scholarship
Dismissal of the Certiorari Petition in Pacific Rivers Council: A Bullet Dodged in the Supreme Court\u27s War Against Public Challenges to Flawed Federal Land Use Planning
No full textThis article looks at how recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions insulating agency decision making from legal challenges and expanding the deference given to agency interpretations of their statutory and regulatory authority have made it harder for the public to dispute, let alone overturn, agency planning decisions like those made in U.S. Forest Service land and resource management plans. The recent grant of certiorari in U.S. Forest Service v. Pacific Rivers Council, although subsequently dismissed by the Court, suggests that the Court would *227 like to go further in protecting the federal land management planning process from judicial review. This article uses the original grant in Pacific Rivers Council as a springboard to examine the Court\u27s view of the federal resource planning process and citizen involvement in it
The National Criminal Justice Commission Act – A Microcosm of Congressional Paralysis
No full textOn March 5, 2014, former U.S. Senator James H. (Jim) Webb, delivered Georgetown Law Center’s thirty-fourth Annual Philip A. Hart Memorial Lecture: “The National Criminal Justice Commission Act –a Microcosm of Congressional Paralysis.” Mr. Webb graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1968; served in the United States Marines from 1968 to 1972; received his J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center in 1975; became the Secretary of the Navy from 1987 to 1988; and then was elected to the United States Senate in 2006 serving from 2007 to 2013. Mr. Webb has also had a career as a screenwriter, journalist, producer, and author, publishing ten books
Civil Rights 3.0
Get PDFIt is now commonplace to hear the LGBT rights movement being described as the last, or the next, or today’s, pre-eminent civil rights issue. This chapter will explore what that means from several perspectives: What does the label tell us about the civil rights paradigm itself? If the achievement of marriage equality is the great civil rights achievement of this generation, what does that suggest about a future for equality more generally? How have new forms of, and technologies for, movement building affected the idea and practice of civil rights? Does the civil rights paradigm have a future? I focus in on three aspects of the social meaning of civil rights: legal doctrine and legal institutions, social movement strategies, and the tension between the discourse of challenges to social hierarchy and that of civil rights.
What we learn is that LGBT advocates have contributed to the overall project of formal equality under law primarily by developing an extraordinary strategic and tactical dexterity, uniquely so at the state level and in its alliance with the business sector. As to the latter, however, there are serious potential disadvantages. In the current political framework, the possibility of advances in substantive equality law-–either statutory or Constitutional-–has shrunken to the point that, even as LGBT rights groups make breakthroughs in achieving goals such as marriage equality, they will do well to avoid having to take backward steps with regard to such overarching concepts as the disparate impact principle or heightened scrutiny. For the future, the big question for this movement-–and all other social justice movements in the United States-–is whether it will deploy its talents and resources to challenge embedded, structural forms of discrimination
Global Health and the Law
Get PDFThe last two decades have brought revolutionary changes in global health, driven by popular concern over AIDS, novel influenzas, and maternal mortality. Given the rapid globalization that is a defining feature of today’s world, the need for a robust system of global health law has never been greater. Global health law has been defined as the legal norms, processes, and institutions designed primarily to attain the highest possible standard of physical and mental health for the world’s population. Global health law is not an organized legal system, with a unified treaty monitoring body, such as the World Trade Organization. There is, however, a network of treaties and “soft” law instruments that powerfully affect global health—many of which arise under the auspices of the World Health Organization. See Lawrence O. Gostin, Global Health Law (Harvard University Press, 2014).
The WHO is the most important institution for negotiating international health agreements. Despite WHO’s normative powers, modern international health law is remarkably thin, with only two major treaties adopted since the agency’s creation, the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control and the International Health Regulations. Despite the potential of “soft” and “hard” instruments to set norms and mobilize multiple actors, global health law-making has major limitations: states are loath to constrain themselves and, therefore, often reject international law or agree only to weak norms; high-income states are reluctant to finance capacity building in lower-income states or provide un-earmarked funding to WHO; and compliance mechanisms are often weak or non-existent. However, global health law, despite its limitations, remains vital to achieving global health with justice
Global Rules for Global Health: Why We Need An Independent, Impartial WHO
Get PDFOver the past few years the World Health Organization (WHO) has been undergoing a significant reform process. The immediate trigger was a budget crisis in 2010 that spurred massive lay-offs at the global agency. But at a more fundamental level, deeper systematic changes in global health governance have made reform imperative. While WHO reform draws relatively little attention outside diplomatic circles in Geneva, at stake are critical issues that will impact public health everywhere. This article’s key messages are: Recent outbreaks of MERS highlight the need for a global response to infectious disease The WHO has had a crucial role in developing rapid information sharing on new infectious threats and fair arrangements for access to drugs and vaccines and to research and development The WHO is the only international agency that can broker such global rules but is badly underfunded to perform this core function The MERS outbreaks offer an opportunity to reform WHO financing
The ACA’s Contraceptive Mandate: Religious Freedom, Women’s Health, and Corporate Personhood
Get PDFOn June 30 2014 the Supreme Court decided Burwell v Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc, in a deeply divided judgment that engaged religious freedom, women’s health, and corporate personhood. Three closely held for-profit organizations challenged the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate, objecting to four contraceptive methods that they believe acted as abortifacients, in violation of their Christian beliefs.
The Court held that the contraceptive mandate violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, ruling that the Act’s protections extended to closely held corporations, with the mandate substantially burdening their religious freedoms. The Court acknowledged the federal government’s compelling interest in ensuring reproductive services, but said that the government could achieve this objective less restrictively, for example by directly funding the four contraceptive methods or by offering corporations the same accommodation given to non-profit religious organizations.
The Court’s judgment privileges corporate rights and religious freedoms, while burdening women’s health and reproductive autonomy. The Court failed to recognize the role of reproductive services in women’s equal participation in social and economic life, and deferred to companies’ subjective beliefs that the four contraceptive methods can prevent a fertilized egg from attaching to the uterus, for which there is no scientific evidence. The Supreme Court also created significant ambiguity around the definition of a ‘closely-held’ corporation, the extent to which large companies have religious freedoms, and whether Hobby Lobby applies to medical services beyond contraception. As well as undermining women’s reproductive health, the case solidifies a jurisprudential trend towards broadening corporate rights, which is constraining public health regulation in a wide range of areas including marketing of junk food, tobacco, and alcohol
FISA Reform
Get PDFCongress and the Executive Branch are poised to take up the issue of FISA reform in 2014. What has been missing from the discussion is a comprehensive view of ways in which reform could be given effect—i.e., a taxonomy of potential options. This article seeks to fill the gap. The aim is to deepen the conversation about abeyant approaches to foreign intelligence gathering, to allow fuller discussion of what a comprehensive package could contain, and to place initiatives that are currently under consideration within a broader, over-arching framework. The article begins by considering the legal underpinnings and challenges to the President\u27s Surveillance Program. It then examines how technology has altered the types of information available, as well as methods of transmission and storage. The article builds on this to develop a taxonomy for how a statutory approach to foreign intelligence gathering could be given force. It divides foreign intelligence gathering into two categories: front-end collection and back-end analysis and use. Each category contains a counterpoise structured to ensure the appropriate exercise of Congressionally-mandated authorities. For the front-end, this means balancing the manner of collection with requirements for approval. For the back-end, this means offsetting implementation with transparency and oversight. The article then considers the constituent parts of each category