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Automation and the International Human Right to Work
Get PDFAutomation continues to result in significant structural changes to the nature of work as computers, robots, or Artificial Intelligence (AI) are performing an increasing number of jobs. These technologies have elevated the possibilities for human prosperity and innovation, but job loss, privacy infringements, and the increasing agency of robotic systems are all acknowledged risks. These concerns are not new. In 1948, when delegates from 48 countries came together to sign the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), they sought to capture in words what a “good human life” meant, which included the right to work. Human rights instruments, like the UDHR, provide a useful framework for analyzing the risks and ramifications of technological development in automation. As such, this Article examines how technology is exacerbating right to work violations and increasing the need for right to work protections in order to proactively respond to the negative effects of an increasingly automated world
The Intersection of COVID and the Open Meetings Act: How COVID Has Impacted Public Hearings and Public Participation at the Local Government Level
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The Intersection of COVID and the Open Meetings Act: How COVID Has Impacted Public Hearings and Public Participation at the Local Government LevelAndrew J. Welch III, Partner, Smith Welch Webb & Whit
The Illusory Promise of Free Enterprise: A Primer to Promoting Racially Diverse Entrepreneurship
Get PDFThe U.S. Census reports that Minority business ownership exceeds the corresponding racial makeup of U.S. demographics. Based on these figures, the principle of free enterprise seems to be acting on equal grounds. Could entrepreneurship be the social panacea for abolishing racial biases and the inequality gap? This Essay argues that this parity of Minority entrepreneurship is misleading. The Kauffman Foundation and Small Business Administration most recently reported that Black-owned firms represent only 7% of all U.S. businesses, Asian-owned firms represent only 4.3%, and Hispanic-owned firms represent only 10.6%. These businesses typically do not grow or expand, leaving the number of people employed by them relatively constant. Overall, minority-owned firms experience more business failure, turnover, and job loss than traditional businesses. This disparity in American free enterprise is, in and of itself, a source of systemic racism and social injustice. Seemingly, American Minority entrepreneurs are given a false hope of economic independence. In fact, this Essay illustrates that current legal programs destine many of them for insolvency, bad credit, debt accumulation, or, at best, being rendered small and meaningless in the marketplace without the proper tools and opportunities to increase equity and wealth. The Essay concludes by proposing new legal methods to increase dedicated access to capital, networking, guidance, and education for racially diverse entrepreneurs. Specifically, it proposes relaxing bureaucracy, fixing biases in lending, forming racially inclusive networks, and cultivating the role of lawyers as social agents who can inform Minorities about impediments and opportunities to accumulate wealth and economic growth
Cyber Conflicts in Outer Space: Lessons from SCADA Cybersecurity
Get PDFThe story of cybersecurity begins in land. By land, a cyber operations expert would mean the land mass on the surface of the Earth. The great monuments to human achievement surround our daily lives, every hour of every day. These testaments to human ingenuity are not the usual ones known to be appreciated as works of art. The monuments of concern for cybersecurity include, among others, power plants, electrical substations, water dams, water processing plants, auto assembly factories, and satellite ground stations. On January 10, 2014, Australia’s IT News reported that Russian researchers Sergey Gordeychik and Gleb Gritsai discovered vulnerabilities in industrial control systems that granted them “full control of systems running energy, chemical and transportation systems.” The researchers spent a year prying into the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems that controlled critical national infrastructure and, in particular, noted vulnerabilities in the Siemens WinCC software for industrial control systems. The Siemens SIMANTIC WinCC refers to one of the SCADA components. In this case, the WinCC serves as a human machine interface portal for the use of the operator to control remote operations. Siemens did eventually release security updates for its SCADA products to patch critical vulnerabilities. One of the vulnerabilities would have allowed an attacker “to remotely execute arbitrary code on a Siemens SIMATIC WinCC SCADA server by sending specially crafted packets to it.” This vulnerability received a score of 10 in the Common Vulnerability Scoring System—the maximum—since it would have allowed a full system’s compromise
The Future of Bankruptcy Appeals: Appellate Standing After Lexmark Considered
Get PDFThe purpose of this Article is to summarize the current state of the law regarding appellate standing in bankruptcy appeals within the various sister circuit courts of the United States, and to recommend how the law of appellate review of bankruptcy court orders should be applied. We will begin with a purely descriptive summary of the law of standing in federal courts and of standing to appeal orders of bankruptcy courts specifically. From this discussion it should be clear that courts almost universally limit appellate standing of bankruptcy court orders to parties that can demonstrate that they are a person-aggrieved—in other words, have been pecuniarily harmed—by that order. The requirement that a party demonstrate a direct pecuniary interest to have standing to appeal a bankruptcy court order is often justified by arguments based on judicial economy and is understood as a prudential standing doctrine. As a prudential doctrine, the person-aggrieved test applied to limit standing has no basis in the constitution or the statutory text of the modern bankruptcy code. Given the Supreme Court’s recent holdings—most notably Lexmark International, Inc. v. Static Control Components, Inc. —which aim to curb the use of prudential standing tests devoid of statutory or constitutional justifications, the law regarding standing to appeal bankruptcy court orders is subject to change. We will summarize developments in the law of standing to appeal bankruptcy court orders across the several circuits. Recently, the Supreme Court declined to grant certiorari review to an appellant of a bankruptcy court order who sought clarity regarding the continued legality of the person-aggrieved test in bankruptcy appeals. Accordingly, in the immediate future, Lexmark’s impact on bankruptcy appeals will be defined exclusively by the several circuits. We will conclude with our recommendations that courts should combine different circuit approaches to allowing and limiting appeals. Specifically, we recommend that courts adopt the Ninth Circuit’s interpretation of Lexmark combined with the Seventh and Tenth Circuits’ rules for appellant standing
Why the United Kingdom Should Look to Switzerland\u27s Immigration System to Protect the English Premier League After Brexit
Get PDFGlobal talent is crucial to the economic behemoth that is the English Premier League (EPL). Having left the European Union (EU), the United Kingdom (UK) and the EPL are at a crossroads. The UK could implement immigration laws that represent “openness,” or a more insular path to protect English soccer players. Switzerland provides an example of a state outside the EU that maintains an immigration system similar to that of the UK prior to Brexit. Russia provides an example of a state that has wholly different and far more distant relationship with the EU. To safeguard the EPL’s position as the most dominant domestic soccer league in the world, the UK should look to Switzerland’s approach to immigration with regard to soccer players
Government Activism in Bankruptcy
Get PDFIt is widely recognized that bankruptcy law can stymie regulatory enforcement and present challenges for governments when regulated businesses file for Chapter 11. It is less-widely understood that bankruptcy law can present governments with opportunities to advance policy goals if they are willing to adopt tactics traditionally associated with activist investors, a strategy we call “government bankruptcy activism.” The bankruptcy filings by Chrysler and General Motors in 2009 are a famous example: the government of the United States used the bankruptcy process to help both auto manufacturers resolve their financial distress while promoting the policy objectives of protecting union workers and addressing climate change. A decade later, the government of California applied its bargaining power in the Pacific Gas & Electric Company’s Chapter 11 case to protect climate policies and the victims of wildfires. These examples illustrate that, by tapping into the bankruptcy system, governments gain access to the exceptional powers that a debtor enjoys under bankruptcy law, which can complement the traditional tools of appropriations and regulation to facilitate and accelerate policy outcomes. This strategy is especially useful in times of urgency and policy paralysis, when government bankruptcy activism can provide a pathway past veto players in the political system. However, making policy through the bankruptcy system presents potential downsides as well, as it may also allow governments to evade democratic accountability and obscure the financial losses that stakeholders are forced to absorb to help fund those policy outcomes
Panel III: Antitrust & Big Tech: Consolidation and the Resulting Tension
No full textPanel III: Antitrust & Big Tech: Consolidation and the Resulting Tension
Lawrence (Larry) A. Reicher, Chief, Office of Decree Enforcement and Compliance (Antitrust Division), United States Department of Justice (Moderator)
Roger P. Alford, Professor of Law, Notre Dame Law School
Marina Lao, Board of Visitors Research Scholar and Edward S. Hendrickson Professor of Law, Seton Hall University School of La
Law, Growth, and the Identity Hurdle: A Theory of Legal Reform
Get PDFThis Article offers a new theoretical approach to understanding resistance to legal change in the corporate and commercial context by introducing the sociological concept of community economic identity (CEI) into legal scholarship. I argue that community leaders (typically, but not exclusively, from the political, legal, and business spheres) generate public and recognizable identities-e.g., Coal Country or Motor City -with respect to some commercial activities. These identities influence how law reform is conceived and deployed within jurisdictional boundaries (i.e., country, state, town, region, etc.). CEI complicates the prevailing public choice narrative regarding the influence of special interests in the law reform process. Efforts to promote efficient legal reforms absent CEI considerations may prove difficult because of the underappreciated social significance of some economic activities to a community. For example, an old automobile manufacturing plant may still anchor a towns economic identity decades after the jobs have gone. Hopes of return to a past era when automobile manufacturing reigned supreme may lead the local community to resist regulations that are perceived as undermining a future for the industry. The local perception may be that important aspects of social relationships in that community are tied to the identity industry and are a form of social glue that helps to bind the community. Reforms that undermine this relationship are therefore seen as socially harmful, even if they are economically beneficial. I make the case that, while political-economy explanations for laws role in business regulations are plentiful and invaluable, complementary sociological analysis helps to provide a richer and more comprehensive understanding of why communities may choose or resist specific legal reforms
Health Reform Reconstruction
Get PDFThis Article connects the failed, inequitable U.S. coronavirus pandemic response to conceptual and structural constraints that have held back U.S health reform for decades and calls for reconstruction. For more than a half-century, a cramped “iron triangle” ethos has constrained health reform conceptually. Reforms aimed to balance individual interests in cost, quality, and access to health care, while marginalizing equity, solidarity, and public health. In the iron triangle era, reforms unquestioningly accommodated four legally and logistically entrenched fixtures — individualism, fiscal fragmentation, privatization, and federalism — that distort and diffuse any reach toward social justice. The profound racial disparities and public health failures of the U.S. pandemic response have agonizingly manifested the limitations of pre-2020 health reform and demand a reconstruction.
Health reform reconstruction begins with a new conceptual framework that aims to realize health justice. Health justice requires commitments to anti-racism, equitable distribution of the burdens and benefits of public investments in health care and public health (for which health care access, quality, and cost are useful, but not exhaustive, metrics), and community empowerment. These commitments put health justice on a collision course with the fixtures of individualism, fiscal fragmentation, privatization, and federalism. Thus, incremental reforms must be measured by the extent to which they confront these fixtures. This Article describes how health reform reconstruction can chart the path for legal change and proposes “confrontational incrementalism” as a method for recognizing the necessity of reconstructive reform, along with its near impossibility