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Resisting Static Inertia: A Statutory Framework for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Authority over Private Nuclear Storage Licensing
Get PDFThis Note analyzes the various approaches that United States courts have taken on the licensing authority of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as it relates to the private temporary storage of spent nuclear fuel. It seeks to establish a sound statutory basis for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC’s) authority to issue such licenses under the Atomic Energy Act (AEA) by recharacterizing spent nuclear fuel as a “byproduct material” under the meaning of the Act. It then looks to the enumerated uses of byproduct material to establish that the NRC has the authority to issue licenses to the private sector to store spent nuclear fuel. Finally, it will argue that the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) could not and should not be interpreted as restricting or superseding the NRC’s existing licensing authority under the AEA. This interpretation of the AEA and NWPA is more reflective of the statutory language and provides for a better nuclear waste policy
Adverse Childhood Experiences and Familial Factors in Adolescent Suicidality
Get PDFPurpose: Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are risk factors for adolescent suicidal ideation (SI), but the influence of immediate family factors on this association remains understudied. This study examines how family functioning (FF) and perceived parental criticism (PPC) moderate the relationship between ACEs and SI. Methods: 46 community-based adolescents between the ages of 15 and 19 (Mage = 17.43 years, 69.57% female) participated in a study examining cognitive risk factors for SI. Several self-report measures were administered: the Suicidal Ideation Questionnaire to assess SI severity, the Adverse Childhood Experiences Questionnaire to measure ACEs, the McMaster Family Assessment Device – General Functioning Scale to evaluate FF, and the Perceived Criticism Measure to determine PPC. Results: Neither the presence (ß = .26, p = .09) nor the count of ACEs (ß = .24, p = .12) significantly predicted SI severity. SI severity was significantly associated with specific ACEs such as emotional abuse, emotional neglect, and mental illness or suicide attempts in the household (ß = .39-.65, p = .00-.04), but not with others (ß = -.21-.40, p = .08-.99). Furthermore, FF (ß = .28, p < .01) and PPC (ß = .19, p =.04) independently moderated the association between ACEs and SI severity, while their combined interaction was not significant (ß = -.03, p = .74). Conclusion: Specific ACEs predicted SI severity. Moreover, lower FF and higher PPC independently amplified the impact of ACEs on SI severity in adolescents, highlighting the need for interventions that enhance FF and address PPC to mitigate adolescent suicide risk
Corrupt Joint Ventures in the Market for Residential Real-Estate-Settlement Services: Christopher L. Peterson & Jeffrey P. Ehrlich
Get PDFClosing costs in residential-real-estate sales have long acted as a significant barrier to American home ownership. In the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act of 1974 (RESPA), Congress attempted to limit these costs by prohibiting referral fees, or “kickbacks,” between the various settlement-services providers. In 1983, Congress adopted an exception to its kickback prohibition for affiliated-business arrangements, where residential-real-estate service providers jointly own a business and the only thing of value received by a referring party from the arrangement is a proportional return on its ownership interest in the affiliated business. For over 40 years, courts have struggled to determine the circumstances under which these arrangements are permissible. In the last few years, the real-estate-settlement- services market has experienced a proliferation of joint ventures attempting to facilitate referral payments through the affiliated-business-arrangement exception. In these joint ventures, typically between real-estate agents, on the one hand, and mortgage brokers or title-insurance companies, on the other, the real-estate agent takes a sizable ownership share in the joint venture without contributing significant capital. Mortgage brokers and title companies arrange these joint ventures as a means of rewarding real-estate agents for referrals. Real-estate agents enter these joint ventures to earn ancillary profits from the mortgage and title closing costs that are paid by homebuyers and sellers. But these joint ventures are a bad deal for consumers because they stifle competition and increase homebuying costs, including “junk fees.” We argue that (1) the common practice of forming joint ventures by offering discounted investment opportunities violates RESPA’s kickback prohibition, and (2) many joint ventures violate the prohibition on abusive conduct in the Consumer Financial Protection Act of 2010 (CFPA) when real-estate agents take advantage of consumers by steering them into co- owned settlement-services providers. We conclude with proposed compliance principles and policy recommendations
Emotional Manipulation, Coercion, and Precarity in the Tales of Jamīl and Buthayna
Get PDFThis article rereads several canonical anecdotes from the story-cycle of the famed ʿudhrī lover Jamīl b. Maʿmar and his beloved, Buthayna. Rather than flatly accepting the stories’ internal interpretations or the traditional frameworks through which these stories have been interpreted, in this article, I provide an alternative interpretation of the story-cycle by focusing on how Buthayna might have experienced the relationship. This article argues that the Jamīl-Buthayna story-cycle can be read as more open-ended than previously considered, that it explores themes of emotional manipulation and abuse just as much as it deals with abstemious chastity and noble sentiments, that Jamīl might not be the outstanding moral exemplar for the modern reader that the medieval tradition built him up to be. Beyond that, when we read these stories from Buthayna’s—or any beloved’s—perspective, it becomes apparent how far this role might expose an individual to threat, scandal, and precarity within their broader social world
Letter from the Editor
Get PDFDear Reader,
We are honored to present The Columbia University Journal of Global Health Spring 2025 Issue. Political disruptions in the United States—stop-and-start suspensions of funding for health-disparities research and international health assistance—have exposed the precariousness of independent scientific governance and global health cooperation. These disruptions ripple outward, interrupting essential care in low- and middle-income countries—from antimalarial drug distribution to treatment of postpartum hemorrhage—and spurring renewed commitments to locally sovereign, regionally financed health-care infrastructure. Even as—and perhapsespecially because—state support for equity-centered research wanes, our journal remains steadfast in publishing high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship on health disparities.
This issue examines determinants of health across vulnerable communities: low adherence to malaria-preventive therapies among pregnant women in Uganda, lifestyle-related predictors of depression in midlife women, and the structural histories of chattel enslavement undergirding obstetric racism in the United States. Read together, the studies in our Spring 2025 issue explore alternatives to paternalistic models of care, pointing instead to community-led, history-aware interventions, chief among them Uganda’s Village Health Teams and Black midwifery.
With the same devotion to community-anchored programming, we have continued to convene expert-led educational events. Our journal hosted “City in Crisis: Housing Insecurity and Health Equity,” where Deborah Padgett, PhD, MPH, MA, introduced students across the Columbia University campus to Housing First—an evidence-based approach to improving health forpeople experiencing homelessness. For our journal members, Juliana Bol, PhD, delivered “Humanitarianism: Principles and Law,” a teach-in tracing the evolution of humanitarian action and legal principles from the Geneva Conventions to current protections for climate-related displacement. We also partnered with Alice! Health Promotion on an “Alcohol Harm Reduction”workshop for our student members, focused on safer-use planning to prevent alcohol poisoning.
Honoring our commitment to centering student voices, we broadened avenues for early-career scholars to share their perspectives on public health. We welcomed the inaugural cohort of our High School Scientific Journalism Fellowship: New York students—mentored by our editors—completed literature reviews and drafted, revised, and published blogs with our journal. Fellows produced more than eight blog posts on global health themes, from mental health supports in schools to social stigmas surrounding neurodegenerative diseases.
This Spring 2025 issue is a milestone we celebrate with our staff, whose care carried each manuscript from submission to publication. We likewise remain indebted to our faculty advisors—Ana Navas-Acien, MD, PhD, MPH, and Juliana Bol, PhD—for their steadying guidance throughout the editorial process. We express our sincere gratitude to Dr. Bol, our outgoing advisor, and congratulate her on her appointment as an assistant professor at the City University of New York Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy. To the authors who entrusted us with rigorous manuscripts, and to the peer reviewers whose thoughtful critiques strengthened them, we extend our sincere appreciation. And to our readers: you remain essential to The Columbia University Journal of Global Health community; we hope the pages ahead prove substantive, stimulating, and socially salient.
Sincerely,
Ann Thanh Phan & Jorge Hernandez-Perez
Co-Editors-in-Chief, The Columbia University Journal of Global Healt
Detachable Speech: Artistic Expression, Same-Sex Weddings, and the First Amendment
No full textIn the last decade, courts have consistently upheld objections to public accommodation laws that would obligate unwilling vendors to provide services for same-sex weddings. At the heart of these disputes is the claim that, when they are required to provide wedding services to same-sex couples, vendors who oppose same-sex marriage are unconstitutionally forced to endorse them. These cases typically classify wedding content, such as photography and wedding cakes, as a form of artistic, personal, and ideological speech that endorses same-sex weddings. In this paper, I argue that wedding content not only isn’t a form of endorsement, but that it is altogether devoid of political, religious, and ethical values attributable to the service provider. Rather than personal and ideological speech, wedding content is a form of speech that I call detachablespeech—that is, speech which is intentionally designed for adoption by another party, and, conversely, isn’t meant to convey the creator’s personal ideology. From advertisements and marketing materials to sitcoms and commissioned film screenplays, contentgenerators who work in creative industries routinely and voluntarily create expression that doesn’t reflect their personal values. Indeed, in some cases, detachable content—e.g., a greeting card or a sign meant for the front lawn—is fungible and arguably doesn’t even become speech until it’s adopted by another party. Similarly, wedding content is not designed to convey the service provider’s values any more than a greeting card reflects the manufacturer’s personal point of view. Wedding content, rather than ideological speech,is a form of speech widget produced to specification. The recognition that wedding content is not an endorsement substantially weakens the First Amendment challenge to public accommodation laws in connection with same-sex weddings
Bridging the Workers' Data Value Gap in the Age of Corporate Automation
No full textThe rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (“AI”) is transforming corporate innovation, enabling the automation of work traditionally performed by humans. Companies increasingly rely on internal data to develop and train AI systems, much of which originates from their own workforces. This includes work products created by employees or contractors in the course of their duties, here referred to as “workers’ data.” Workers’ data may hold significant value as it is often of high quality, high quantity and of high relevance. Yet, ironically, if workers’ data is used for automation purposes, it could displace the very employees who were responsible for generating the data in the first place. The risk of a “job apocalypse,” where hundreds of millions of jobs could be replaced by AI in the coming years, becomes increasingly real as more companies push towards automating parts of their workforces. Work products used to generate workers’ data will often qualify as copyright-protected works. The workers, who are authors in copyright law, will often have assigned their copyright to their respective employers or contractees, whether by statute or by contract. However, that companies may own the copyright for the work products, including the data, does not necessarily confer unlimited freedom of use. This Article critically examines thelegal boundaries on the use of workers’ data for AI and automation purposes, focusing on the European Union (EU), the United Kingdom (UK), and the United States. Overall, the current legal framework largely falls short of adequately protecting workers’ rights when it comes to use of their data by employers, with one important exception. In the EU, the DSM Directive introduces a right for authors to claim additional remuneration where the economic value derived from their works is significantly greater thanwhat they were originally paid. This right to contract adjustment, commonly referred to as the “best-seller” rule, may, in certain cases, help workers whose data are being used without fair remuneration, bridging what is coined as the “workers’ data valuegap.” Whether workers are entitled to further remuneration will depend on highly fact-specific circumstances, and outcomes are likely to vary from case to case.The urgency of addressing these issues cannot be overstated. Workers’ data is expected to play an increasingly central role in corporate automation projects worldwide, with consequences that extend far beyond the EU. Without a clear and coherent legal framework, there is a dual risk. On the one hand, companies may undervalue or fail to properly compensate for the human contributions that make automation possible; on the other hand, legal uncertainty or excessive compensation claims could deter or slow down automation initiatives. This Article calls for economic, policy, and legal research to explore these questions in greater detail, and to develop balanced solutions that both protect workers’ rights and foster innovation in the coming age of corporate automation
Selenocentrism and Heliocentrism in Early Modern Persianate Imperial Cultures: ʿAlī versus Jesus, with Hermes Presiding : A Harranian Essay in Astro-Decoloniality
No full textIslam, as all moderns know, is the religion of the Moon. Yet it has been experienced as equally Solar (and Venusian) since late antiquity, thanks to its Iranian-Egyptian-Greek-Roman imperial Heliocentrist genetics. By the same genetic token, the Sun-supremacism that is colonialist-Orientalist Eurocentricism merely continues Latin Christian Jesuan Heliocentrism—a theological rite that, painfully ironically, remains the textbook touchstone of modern Western rationality; meanwhile non-Latin Christian but equally Western philosophical, scientific, technological, and imperial genealogies of both Moon and Sun continue to be actively unmapped.
As astro-decolonial remedy, I propose Selenocentrism and Heliocentrism as a primary binary pair whose creative tension helped shape human cultures generally and Islamicate ones specifically, and early modern Persianate imperial cultures above all: for they saw the apotheosis of the peculiarly Islamic embrace of Harranian-Hermetic astral magic as the preferred vehicle of Neoplatonic philosophical-theurgic practice, rejecting the weird Greek insistence on Moon as nonimperial female only in favor of the Harranian devotion to male Moon as Cosmic King and brother to male-female Hermes. The Islamic marriage of Avicennan Moon-ascent to Suhravardian Sun-ascent that defined the post-Mongol era was emblematized by a new, also peculiarly Islamic Trinity—Muḥammad-ʿAlī-Fāṭima as Sun-Moon-Venus—used talismanically by Sunni and Shiʿi alike, as well as the curiously Joycean association of Moon and Mercury in Arabo-Persian grimoires and imperial horoscopes. And as in any Space Race, imperial astro-theurgic politics became pitched with the approach of the Islamic Millennium. Thus was Timurid, Safavid, and ʿAdilshahid Selenocentrism, starring ʿAlī as Moon, countered by Mughal and Ottoman Heliocentrism, starring Jesus as Sun—both on the basis of Ibn ʿArabī’s cosmic-imperial doctrine of sacral power (walāya) and Pythagorean fusion of the Names and the Planets.
This astro-history of Islam, the Greater West, has since been garbled to the point of illegibility. Its political association today solely with the Crescent Moon (per many state and territorial flags) has little to do with the Islamic Lunar calendar, but is rather an artifact of the Latin Christian obsession with the Ottomans—who claimed Jesus as Sun but increasingly also ʿAlī as Moon in their contest with the Safavids and Mughals—as Selenocentric Oriental Saracens, horrified by their self-identification as European Jesuan Heliocentrists too. As such, “the West and the Rest” colonial fable is not merely historicidal and genocidal, but also a weirdly aberrant (gharīb) form of the Moon-Sun Dance ubiquitous across human cultures in its dysfunctional relationship with the Moon. I therefore further propose Islamic Neopaganism as a Hermetic partycrashing trick for showing up the reflexive modern historiographical reduction of Science to strictly male Heliocentrism (think the “Scientific Revolution”) and Religion to strictly female Selenocentrism (think Islam and Wicca). Remarrying active-passive Solar “West” to passive-active Lunar “Not-West” by means of Consort-Warrior Venus and Trickster-Psychopomp Mercury is a more historiographically empirical means of decolonially Drawing Down the Panopticon Moon
Kitāb al-Safar: A Book on the Management of Travel by a Yemeni Rasulid Sultan
No full textThe sixth sultan of Rasulid Yemen, al-Malik al-Afḍal al-ʿAbbās, wrote the Kitāb al-Safar wa-mā yakūn fīhi min al-tadbīr in the mid-fourteenth century as a guide to the best ways to manage travel at that time, whether on land or by sea. In this unique work, the sultan describes common problems encountered by travelers due to weather, fatigue, illness, hunger, and thirst. He recommends food, drinks, and medicinal plants to treat different conditions and includes advice from earlier physicians, such as Ibn Sīnā. This short text can be found in a mixed manuscript of writings by and for the sultan, which has been published previously in facsimile. Here, Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Raḥīm Jāzim, a Yemeni historian of the Rasulid era, provides an Arabic critical edition of the Kitāb al-Safar with extensive notes on Yemeni dialect usage. The foreword in English is by Daniel Martin Varisco