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“It’s Not Ok to Not Be Ok”: Suicide, California’s Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, and The Constitution
No full textIndividuals who commit suicide are not incompetent or even making an irrational decision. Yet state laws, such as the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act in California, continue to allow mental health professionals to lock up suicidal patients in psychiatric facilities against the patient’s will. These commitments, however, are not always beneficial, and in many instances are detrimental to both the patient and the mental health professional. Patients can be traumatized from the experience, feel more suicidal from lack of hope and feelings of betrayal. Mental health professionals cannot effectively treat suicidal patients when providers are fearful of liability or when their patients refuse to share information because they think they will be committed. As mental health awareness increases, so does the awareness of involuntary commitments and the dangers of seeking help. Current mental health laws can deter suicidal individuals and others struggling with their mental health from getting any help at all, effectively nullifying the goal of the laws aimed to protect individuals from suicide. This note will analyze the Lanterman- Petris-Short Act and will suggest improvements that should be made to truly help achieve the goal of helping suicidal individuals without resorting to actions akin to imprisonment
Pack Your Bags…We’re Moving to the Public Domain: The Expiration of Copyright Terms and Its Implications on Future Protection
Get PDFThe following Note addresses the expiration of copyright terms for a multitude of creative works and the various implications of that expiration for their future IP protection. It explores the conflicting perspectives of stakeholders, from the excitement of artists and everyday creatives versus the concerns of industry leaders about the potential erosion of their copyright monopolies. Drawing from landmark cases like Baker v. Selden and Dastar Corporation v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., this Note highlights the complex questions surrounding copyright expiration and the strategic use of trademark protection. The Note emphasizes the necessity for coherent legal frameworks to ensure a harmonious balance between fostering innovation and preserving cultural accessibility in a digital world
Pipe Dream: Rethinking CO2 Pipeline Subsidies
Get PDFGenerous government subsidies are driving major expansions of carbon dioxide pipeline infrastructure throughout the United States. The fossil fuel industry stakeholders who pushed for these subsidies argue that more pipelines would support the transportation of more captured carbon dioxide from power plants and ethanol processing facilities to permanent subsurface storage sites. While such pipeline expansions could potentially reduce the greenhouse gas emissions associated with certain fossil fuel energy activities, they would also create unjustifiable new environmental and health threats. Major investments in new carbon dioxide pipeline infrastructure likewise promote continued reliance on fossil fuels for decades to come and thereby slow the transition to low-carbon renewable energy technologies such as wind and solar power. This Article highlights the potential adverse impacts of the federal government’s unprecedented carbon dioxide pipeline subsidy regime and argues that such subsidies are not cost-justifiable in an era of increasingly low-cost renewable energy. The Article then identifies specific statutory reforms capable of restoring a more sensible federal carbon dioxide pipeline policy structure
Executive Power and Patronage: Lessons from Puerto Rico
Get PDFConservatives have made reforming the civil service a top priority, and this was exemplified by former President Donald Trump’s open opposition to job protections that federal civil servants enjoy. President Trump and others who advance a unitary executive theory, pledged to reshape the civil service by amassing appointment, disciplinary and removal powers in the president, although this would make a patronage system more feasible. To this end, President Trump issued an executive order that exposed many career federal civil service workers to a spoils system. This came on the heels of other executive orders that reduced existing workplace protections for career workers. Public condemnation of this move was swift because it was regarded as a departure from longstanding merit rules that have been reaffirmed and expanded over time. Since 1883, the United States has evolved an expert, professional and competent civil service, resulting in a reasonably efficient bureaucracy free of political influence. But that could all change if the executive branch could treat career civil servants as at-will employees, and disregard workplace laws, norms, ethics, and hierarchies. This article describes the evolution of merit rules for federal civil servants, and the shift away from a spoils system. It then uses the experience of civil servants in Puerto Rico to show what a patronage system could look like in the federal government, and the policy, service, and economic impacts it will likely have. The article traces Puerto Rico’s patronage mill to its Spanish colonial roots and shows how this system flourishes despite constitutional and statutory rules prohibiting it. The article details a formal patronage apparatus unlike anything ever seen in the federal government, that is codified in internal political party regulations and implemented by public agency heads and party supporters. These regulations require the educating of public sector workers in electoral matters, mobilizing them to support political campaigns, and using them as enforcers of a politically driven civil service bureaucracy. The article shows that despite the existence of merit rules and the widespread condemnation of political discrimination and associated corruption, patron- age flourishes because political elites benefit from a spoils system, and there are no incentives for reform. The two main political parties of Puerto Rico support and promote patronage and have no incentives to internalize the costs of poor policies, corruption, and inefficiencies stemming from patron- age. The Puerto Rico experience demonstrates how a mature patronage sys- tem can become a cultural norm alongside constitutional and statutory merit rules, with very destructive effects on governance and society. Its resurgence in the federal workplace therefore needs to be guarded against, as is its re- moval from Puerto Rican society. To this end, the article offers an account- ability proposal to address patronage in Puerto Rico
With Fear, Favor, and Flawed Analysis: Decision-Making in U.S. Immigration Courts
Get PDFImmigration judges (IJs), housed within the Executive Office for Immigration Review within the Department of Justice (DOJ), make decisions in asylum and withholding claims, which are life or death matters. And although their title is “judge,” IJs are DOJ attorneys who lack independence and are particularly susceptible to political pressures. Federal court judges and scholars alike have criticized the quality and fairness of IJ decision-making, and many studies have been carried out to better understand the factors that impact it. The prior studies have relied principally on quantitative data because IJ decisions are not publicly available or searchable in any existing database. The authors of this study had unprecedented access to more than five hundred IJ decisions, allowing for both a quantitative and qualitative analysis. Our findings were consistent with other studies in noting that IJ experience and gender made a difference in case outcomes, with male IJs and IJs with enforcement backgrounds denying protection at higher rates. We were able to identify other significant trends as well, including that the most common reasons why IJs denied protection to credible asylum seekers were their findings that they failed to meet the extremely stringent requirements of two elements of the refugee definition--elements which arguably are overly restrictive and inconsistent with international norms. We also observed patterns of incompetence and bias among these decisions. This Article recommends several policy reforms to address the shortcomings we identify, among them: (1) the creation of Article I immigration courts, (2) improvement of IJ competence through more stringent hiring standards and continuing education, (3) increased diversity of IJs based on employment experience, (4) reduced deference to the Board of Immigration Appeals in reviewing cases, and (5) allocating additional resources to immigration adjudication