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Shelter from the Storm: Human Rights Protections for Single-Mother Families in the Time of COVID-19
Get PDFCOVID-19’s arrival, and the changes it has unleashed, reveal how longstanding legal and policy decisions produced structural inequalities that have left so many families, and especially single-parent families with children, all too insecure. The fragility of single-mother families is amplified by the multifaceted discrimination they face. While all single parents, including single fathers and other single relatives who are raising children, share many of these burdens, this Article focuses on the challenges confronting single mothers.
Federal policy choices stand in sharp contrast to the political rhetoric of government support for families. Social and economic policy in the twentieth century developed to support white two-parent marital homes, with a working father and a stay-at-home mother as the ideal norm. Much of the federal government’s support for families is designed to aid this idealized family form. In contrast, single mothers, who deviate from this norm, have historically been subject to vilification. Their pervasive hardships have been justified by sexist stereotypes of single mothers—painting them as immoral, lazy and opportunistic—and policies reflect this deep suspicion.
Other nations have applied human rights norms to reshape economic and social policies to benefit all families. The United States should not be left behind. U.S. government officials and the public should become knowledgeable about these human rights and accept these obligations as well. Educating ourselves about human rights norms and obligations, advocating for ratification of key human rights treaties, and learning from their implementation in other countries are crucial first steps to ensuring justice and protection for all families
Increasing Accountability for Rape in Liberia: The Need for a Forensic System to Increase the Success Rates of Prosecution
Get PDFThe need for a fully functioning forensic system has been identified by the Liberian government and international partners, but it has not been addressed. This Article argues that despite a robust framework put in place to create accountability for rape, Liberia needs a system of collecting and processing forensic evidence to increase the success rate of prosecutions that currently fail due to the inadequacy of non-forensic evidence
The Opioid Doctors: Is Losing Your License a Sufficient Penalty for Dealing Drugs?
Get PDFImagine that a medical board revokes a doctor\u27s license both because he has been peddling thousands of pills of opioids and also because he was caught with a few grams of cocaine. The doctor is a family physician, not a pain management specialist. Yet, during a one-year period he wrote more than 4,000 prescriptions for opioids--roughly eighteen scripts per day. Patients came from multiple states and from hundreds of miles away to get oxycodone prescriptions. And the doctor prescribed large quantities of opioids--up to 240 pills per month--to patients with no record of previously needing narcotic painkillers. Both federal and state law provides an option to charge the doctor as a drug dealer. When a physician writes a prescription for a controlled substance with no legitimate medical purpose, federal and state law considers it to be the same criminal offense as a street dealer selling drugs in a back alley. Prosecutors, however, did not charge the doctor with dealing opioids. They instead indicted him for possession of the small amount of cocaine and ignored the opioid distribution.
Prosecutors (and physicians) claim that there has been a massive crackdown on doctors for improper opioid prescribing. This Article challenges that claim by detailing dozens of recent cases in which state medical boards revoked doctors\u27 licenses for improper opioid prescribing but in which prosecutors never brought any criminal charges for drug dealing. After detailing the egregious conduct of dozens of opioid prescribers, this Article explains why prosecutors are reticent to bring drug distribution charges against doctors and offers a roadmap for reform
Rehabilitating Charge Bargaining
Get PDFNobody likes plea bargaining. Scholars worldwide have excoriated the practice, calling it coercive and unjust, among other pejorative adjectives. Despite its unpopularity, plea bargaining constitutes a central component of the American criminal justice system, and the United States has exported the practice to a host of countries worldwide. Indeed, plea bargaining has even appeared at international criminal tribunals, created to prosecute genocide and crimes against humanity--the gravest crimes known to humankind. Although all forms of plea bargaining are unpopular, commentators reserve their harshest criticism for charge bargaining because charge bargaining is said to distort the factual basis of the defendant\u27s ultimate conviction. Commentators apply this criticism to charge bargaining whether it is used to obtain guilty pleas for domestic crimes or international crimes. This Article shows, however, that the criticisms leveled at domestic charge bargaining have been inappropriately transplanted wholesale to the international context. Through a comprehensive empirical analysis of international criminal indictments and a series of in-depth interviews with international prosecutors, this Article shows that international prosecutors routinely charge their defendants with only a subset of their criminal acts. That is, this Article\u27s empirical analysis reveals that international criminal convictions obtained without charge bargaining suffer from the primary flaw afflicting convictions that are obtained as a result of charge bargaining--factual distortion--yet they gain none of the advantages that charge bargaining can provide. This insight necessarily alters our normative assessment of charge bargaining, so this Article develops a new normative framework by which to evaluate charge bargaining. Specifically, this Article shows that the desirability of charge bargaining in international criminal prosecutions has nothing to do with the contestations surrounding its practice domestically and almost everything to do with one of the most sharply contested normative controversies in all of international criminal law--the controversy surrounding the appropriate breadth of criminal charging
Monopolizing Sports Data
Get PDFWith legal sports betting viewed as a panacea for state budget woes across the United States, the underlying data that fuels the sports betting industry has emerged as an especially valuable asset. In the hopes of capitalizing on state laws that have now legalized sports betting, United States professional sports leagues have attempted to gain exclusive ownership rights over valuable sports betting data by asking legislators to mandate that bookmakers exclusively use data sold through the league. In addition, some sports leagues have imposed policies mandating that teams bundle together their collected data for purposes of selling it exclusively through the league to third parties, and, on the league level, compiling sports data rights with other desirable league rights—all with the hopes of allowing the league to gain control over all data pertaining to their sport, and thus, indirectly, sports betting.
These efforts by the United States professional sports leagues to potentially monopolize sports data markets raise novel questions both in terms of who, if anyone, owns the property rights to sports data and what efforts, if any, are needed to prevent sports leagues from improperly gaining control over sports data markets. This Article proposes that the United States professional sports leagues’ recent attempts to collectivize the sale of sports game data and prevent non-league-affiliated entities from competing in the markets to collect, aggregate, and resell game data gives rise to both legal and policy concerns under federal antitrust laws. In particular, this Article analyzes whether the league-wide sale of sports game data should be viewed as a form of collusion among individual sports teams that may potentially violate section 1 of the Sherman Act, and whether league-wide efforts to secure exclusive rights to sell sports game data should constitute a potential form of exclusionary conduct under section 2 of the Sherman Act
Manufacturing Sovereign State Mootness
Get PDFThe idea that public defendants should receive any special treatment in the mootness context has been subject to intense criticism among commentators. Most notably, in the lead-up to the New York Rifle decision, Joseph Davis and Nicholas Reaves—two prominent First Amendment litigators from the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty—urged the Supreme Court to take the opportunity to correct the lower courts’ practice of blessing government abuse of the voluntary cessation doctrine. Indeed, the Supreme Court has never adopted a presumption in favor of government defendants such as the one applied by the Seventh Circuit in Killeen, and it failed to do so in New York Rifle. Rather, lower courts have created the presumption out of whole cloth, “invok[ing] purely prudential concerns about the supposed public-spiritedness of government litigants.” While this prudential, good-faith presumption would be anathema to Framers like James Madison who knew that government is composed of men and not angels, institutional concerns related to state sovereignty may justify the different treatment afforded to public defendants.
This Note attempts to fill a void in the literature by advocating for a presumption in favor of government defendants in voluntary cessation cases rooted more in structural, rather than merely prudential, justifications. In particular, the Note pulls from a more fully developed body of literature surrounding sovereign state standing to argue that the same principles of sovereignty that grant states broad standing to sue require courts to give more weight to exercises of state lawmaking authority to moot certain cases. However, this special treatment cannot exist in perpetuity. Once the state action becomes far enough removed from the sovereign lawmaking process—action by a university official, for instance—this structural justification no longer holds, and public litigants should be held to the same mootness standards as private defendants
Carbon Market Opportunities in Virginia: Eelgrass, Marshes, Soils, and Forests
Get PDFCarbon sequestration is the storage and capture of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Preserving carbon sequestering sources helps mitigate climate change. Eelgrass, marshes, soils, and forests all sequester carbon. Unfortunately, they are vulnerable to climate change and human development. This paper examines how these sources of carbon sequestration can be incorporated into Virginia’s climate change policies, including the creation of a carbon market. Among other aims, a carbon market would incentivize the preservation and restoration of these species, providing important environmental and economic benefits. The first section of this paper identifies several sources of carbon sequestration, as well as their susceptibility to climate change and human behavior. The second section of this paper contains a summary of properly functioning carbon markets such as those in California and the European Union. This section also details how carbon markets can be corrupted and defrauded by bad actors. The paper then explores recent Virginia legislation regarding carbon market participation. This analysis aims to provide a foundation for how carbon markets can thrive in Virginia.
This abstract has been taken from the author\u27s introduction
The Challenge of Financing Resiliency
No full textBuilding on funding and financing topics covered at recent VCPC events, such as the 2019 conference and May 2019 forum, VCPC partnered with The Riley Center for Livable Communities to host a discussion on strategies and tools local governments can use to finance resilience projects. Featured speakers included representatives of the insurance and banking industries, local government and the private sector