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Bystanders to a Public Health Crisis: The Failures of the U.S. Multi-Agency Regulatory Approach to Food Safety in the Face of Persistent Organic Pollutants
No full textPer- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (“PFAS”) are devastating our food systems and our health. Recent studies link even small exposure to PFAS to a host of adverse health outcomes, including cancer, autoimmune diseases, thyroid disease, liver damage, childhood obesity, infertility, and birth defects.
Food consumption is a primary route of PFAS exposure. PFAS are omnipresent at dangerous levels in our marine and agricultural environments, including in water, soil, fertilizers, compost, and air. From there, they can find their way into virtually every plant, fish, animal, and animal product, and ultimately (in the greatest concentration) into the consumer. In addition, PFAS-laden food processing equipment, disposable dishes, and containers leach dangerous levels of these chemicals into processed food products, further infusing our every meal with PFAS. It is no surprise then that everything from chocolate cake and microwave popcorn to free range eggs, wild caught fish, organic milk, and organic kale can harbor staggering quantities of these toxic substances.
Despite this widespread presence and strong scientific evidence of PFAS’s harmful impact on humans, federal regulation of PFAS in food is currently nonexistent. At least fifteen agencies have a mandate to ensure the safety of our food supply in one form or another. More is not always better. In the case of regulatory agencies, it can lead to fragmented demand for attention, diffusion of responsibility, and bureaucratic bystander apathy. This story has played out time and again with other toxic contaminants like polychlorinated biphenyls (“PCBs”) and pesticides. Despite our country’s devastating experience with past contaminants and the unprecedented scientific progress of our time, however, the federal response to new food safety threats has only become more sluggish and inadequate.
This article lays a pathway for change, taking the issue of PFAS food contamination as a case study for the broader dysfunction in the food safety regulatory system. Part I reviews the history of federal food regulation and explores the role that each federal actor in the field plays in ensuring the safety of the food supply. It analyzes the agencies’ jurisdictional limits, institutional constraints, and funding challenges, revealing a divided and dysfunctional bureaucracy that has failed consumers repeatedly. Part II provides background on the chemical and toxicological profile of PFAS and their widespread presence in the environment in general and food supply in particular. It also surveys the current state of PFAS regulation in the United States and the additional regulatory challenges posed by these substances. Part III examines possible approaches to more effective regulation of environmental contaminants in food and proposes a readily available but currently overlooked mechanism for combatting the current public health crisis of PFAS in food. Lastly, Part IV catalogues the expected benefits of the solution and addresses anticipated skepticism. It concludes that the approach proposed in this article is likely to withstand both legal and policy challenges and can effectively protect consumers from PFAS in food today, while simultaneously garnering much needed data to usher in a more permanent solution in the future
Emerging Challenges in Space Law
No full textModerator: Col Ted Richard, USAF, Staff Judge Advocate, Space Operations Command at United States Space Force
Panelists:
Prof. Chris Borgen, Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Center for International and Comparative Law at St. John\u27s University School of Law
CDR Tracy L. Reynolds, USN, Force Judge Advocate to Commander, Naval Medical Forces Atlantic
Dr. Hitoshi Nasu, Professor of Law at the United States Military Academy, West Poin
Attacking Big Data: Strategic Competition, the Race for AI, and Cyber Sabotage
No full textSpeaker: Prof. Gary Corn, Director of the Technology, Law & Security Program and an adjunct professor at Washington College of Law. American Universit
Federal District Courts May Not Assist Discovery Efforts in Connection with Proceedings Before Arbitral Tribunals Constituted Under the ICSID
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Text, Tone, and Legal Language: Analyzing Mutual Fund Disclosure Sentiment
No full textMutual fund disclosures must include information about a fund\u27s strategies and risks to comply with the letter of the law. But funds should also honor the spirit of Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulations, including informing ordinary investors. Disclosure language creates impressions that can be just as important as the content. But evaluating these soft aspects of disclosures is hard. In this article, we propose using disclosure tone—how positive or negative the language is—to empirically capture these impressions. This measure provides an additional tool to assess compliance with the spirit of disclosure laws. Building on finance research on company disclosures, we develop customized dictionaries specific to mutual fund disclosures. We then introduce a novel sentiment‐scoring framework that generates transparent sentence‐ and disclosure‐level scores for our sample of 164,602 mutual fund summary prospectuses (497k) from 2010 to 2020. Our descriptive analysis validates our dictionary by showing meaningful and statistically significant differences across disclosure sections, fund type, and time. Funds\u27 statements of their principal risks are more negative (and uniformly so) across time than funds\u27 descriptions of their investment strategies. We further explore these relationships using a fixed‐effects regression model. These analyses reveal statistically significant relationships between mutual fund disclosure tone and fund attributes, performance, and disclosure characteristics. These relationships are consistent with SEC requirements that anchor risk discussions in more negative language than strategy discussions. The findings also highlight the role of legal language in setting the overall disclosure tone. Our context‐sensitive approach provides a path to regulate compliance more effectively with both the letter and the spirit of the law. Our framework, which we have made publicly available, provides a robust tool to allow researchers and regulators to assess not only what funds say, but how they say it
In Event of an (AI) Emergency: Interpreting Continuity of Government Provisions in State Constitutions
No full text“Of this I am certain: If we prepare ourselves so that a terrible attack—although it might hurt us—could not destroy us, then such an attack will never come.” - Edward Teller, the “Father of the Hydrogen Bomb,” in an interview with Allen Brown of This Week Magazine in 1957.
Bad actors have already used or may soon use AI to disrupt critical infrastructure, influence elections, and upend economies. Those most concerned about the risks posed by AI argue that it is a matter of when and not if state governments will have to respond to threatened or realized acts of AI aggression. Though a litany of scholars have examined the powers governors may use in emergency situations, less attention has been paid to the role of state legislatures in responding to destabilizing events.
Scholars have justified their focus on governors for practical reasons—the executive branch of state governments has been deemed the “the center of governmental response[s]” to public emergencies. Two trends caution against perpetuating neglect of state legislatures. First, the legal and social bases for governors to take sweeping action in response to emergencies eroded in many states during COVID-19. In turn, many state legislatures, by law, by popular support, or both, have amassed more authority to respond in worst-case scenarios. Second, the likelihood of states being thrown into disarray will only increase as AI evolves and spreads; thus, warranting a closer analysis of what powers state legislatures may exercise to restore normalcy.
Thirty-five state constitutions contain variants of a template “Continuity of Government” (CoG) provision promulgated by the federal government at the height of the Cold War. What events may trigger these provisions, as well as what powers they afford to state legislatures, has evaded judicial scrutiny as a result of state legislatures rarely invoking the relevant provision. It follows that the scholarly analysis of how best to interpret these important provisions should occur in the relative tranquility of the present rather than at the height of a calamity. This preemptive analysis may improve the ability of state legislatures to respond to disorder by clarifying the likely scope and duration of their powers and, ideally, by spurring amendments to clarify the provisions in advance of any such event.
This paper serves as one (and, likely, the first) entry in an inquiry that merits immediate and robust scholarly attention. Relying on the framework set forth by the New Haven School of Jurisprudence, this paper resolves one of the most consequential ambiguities contained in CoG provisions. This framework deserves special consideration given its inclusion of myriad disciplines and its characterization as an “explicitly policy-oriented jurisprudence.”
Scholars from across the legal profession have a role in contributing to this inquiry. The incorporation of AI into legal practice imposes a responsibility on scholars to anticipate how the technology may require new doctrines, laws, and methods of interpretation. Though this paper focuses on the continuation of state governments in the wake of an AI emergency, related inquiries such as how to rethink contract law, property law, and the like upon such an emergency demand more scholarly attention. The exploration of those topics can, in turn, inform what sorts of powers state legislatures may need to exercise and for how long