Columbia University Libraries Journals
Not a member yet
6467 research outputs found
Sort by
Smuggling Conspiracies
Get PDFAmid growing political polarization, human trafficking remains one of the few social causes that retains universal bipartisan support. Nowhere was this clearer than Florida in the spring of 2023, when Governor Ron DeSantis passed widely popular human trafficking reforms. Despite a legislative session marked by national controversy over the state’s extreme antiimmigrant proposals that year, DeSantis’ rhetoric on human trafficking specifically called for the protection of immigrant victims. The story behind the 2023 reforms reveals not a benevolent change of heart or momentary hypocrisy, but an ominous call towards racist tropes plaguing human trafficking and immigration reform for centuries. This Article conducts an extensive legislative history and argues that DeSantis’ legislative efforts tap into theories popularized by QAnon, a far-right decentralized web of conspiracies. In doing so, Florida echoes historical racial narratives and utilizes dog whistles to further justify an expansion of its immigration enforcement powers. The strategy behind Florida’s efforts to generate anti-immigrant hysteria has extended to other states and is now being carried out on a national stage under the new Trump administration. This Article contends that advocates must meet this growing threat by crafting multidisciplinary counter-narratives that directly confront the role of race and reject the respectability politics dominating mainstream trafficking discourse
Reparative Entrepreneurship: Tomica Burke Saul
Get PDFCannabis social equity programs are sub-policies within a larger state marijuana regulatory scheme that are geared towards prioritizing War on Drugs survivors when allocating market space and cannabis sales revenue. Of the over 20 states that have legalized recreational marijuana, many include some version of a cannabis social equity program. The idea of repairing past harm through cannabis entrepreneurship gives a sense of “reparations-ish” policymaking. Through a case study of both the intent and implementation of New York’s Social and Economic Equity (SEE) Plan, this Article examines whether the ideological crux of these programs, the belief that entrepreneurship leads to positive economic outcomes for individuals and communities, can fix decades of discriminatory drug policy rooted in systemic racism. Ultimately, the Article argues that these cannabis social equity programs are more likely to sustain barriers to entry, especially for Black entrepreneurs, whether legal, systemic or political. In this moment of reckoning for the War on Drugs, policies must course-correct and experiment with a new concept of “reparative entrepreneurship.” If the reparations framework advanced in this Article were used, the remedies would be more effective in utilizing entrepreneurship to address the harm of the War on Drugs
Transforming Tax Expenditures: Sloan G. Speck
Get PDFFor decades, reformers have advocated the repeal of tax expenditures—disguised government spending through special preferences in the Internal Revenue Code. And yet, tax expenditures persist, impairing federal tax receipts by more than $1.8 trillion in 2024. This Article introduces a novel mechanism for tax expenditure reform. To the extent that direct statutory repeal proves impossible or impractical, lawmakers can achieve an equivalent result through a strategy of legislative anti-repeal. By radically expanding a tax expenditure’s legal scope, then adjusting progressive income tax rates to account for revenue loss and distributional considerations, lawmakers can effectively eliminate tax expenditures from the tax base and integrate them into the rate structure—a process this Article defines as “base-rate transformation.”
Base-rate transformations reframe conventional understandings of repeal and restrictive reform, as well as traditional reform narratives oriented around a mantra of “broad base, low rates.” Under certain conditions, statutory expansion operates as de facto repeal—or as restrictive reform. The crucial insight is that, for tax expenditures, the stakes of legal change lie largely in how lawmakers address any adjustments to statutory rates. From a normative perspective, base-rate transformations have implications for customary tax norms such as equity, efficiency, and complexity, as well as the political economy of tax expenditure reform. More generally, base-rate transformations challenge standard framings of tax expenditures and press for a more holistic approach to legislative changes to these provisions
Retroactive Application of the New York Foreclosure Abuse Prevention Act: Yudu Zang
Get PDFAt the end of 2022, the New York State Legislature enacted the Foreclosure Abuse Prevention Act (“FAPA”). FAPA brought several significant changes to the then-current statutes and legal rules concerning a mortgagee’s ability to toll or reset the statute of limitations of a foreclosure action through voluntary discontinuance. FAPA’s enactment spurred a wave of litigation, and the disputes focus heavily on the extent and validity of FAPA’s retroactive application. However, the lower courts in New York have issued inconsistent opinions. Given the lack of scholarship and any Court of Appeals decision, this Note ventures to recommend better solutions to the legal questions currently in contention and provide more coherent rules and standards for future cases. It argues that FAPA’s urgent remedial goal lowers the hurdle to overcome presumption against retroactivity under state common law. It then distinguishes, more clearly than the current FAPA case law, what events or prior court decisions in a foreclosure action should vest within the mortgagee a property or due process right that cannot be violated by retroactive application. Finally, it notes that if FAPA’s retroactive application substantially impairs express contract terms, it would violate the Contract Clause of the Constitution, despite the exception elaborated by the Second Circuit
Artificial Intelligence-Driven Rent Pricing Tools & the Housing Crisis
Get PDFThis policy brief explores the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in rent pricing tools that corporate landlords and property management companies use for rental housing, and its consequences for the housing market. Across the United States, landlords have become increasingly reliant on AI-driven rent pricing tools to raise rents and boost theirprofits. This technology, which uses both sensitive proprietary data and publicly available information, is reducing housing accessibility, often driving tenants from their homes. As AI becomes increasingly pervasive in our everyday lives, it is essential that we interrogate its uses, especially in those that have as many collateral consequences as housing. We offer an overview of rent regulation history, the underlying AI technology, and existing policy, and make our own policy recommendations
Recent Progress in Engineered Oncolytic Viruses: A Thematic Review
No full textThis review examines recent research in engineered oncolytic viruses and applies a thematic analysis to identify trends in the field. The major themes identified are tumor microenvironment remodeling, enhancing virus efficiency, treating slow-growing tumors, tumor targeting specificity, and combination with chimeric antigen receptor-T cell therapy. The tumor microenvironment plays a significant role in cancer progression through factors like immunosuppression and hypoxia. Engineered oncolytic viruses may be used to remodel aspects of the tumor microenvironment to favor and facilitate an immune response. Another major consideration in the development of oncolytic viruses is their efficiency in inducing antitumor effects. Viral vectors may be engineered with pro-apoptotic or pro-inflammatory signaling molecules to cause cancer cell death or mediate immune cell infiltration, respectively. Slow-growing tumors present a challenge to oncolytic virotherapy since many viruses infiltrate tumors through infected daughter cells arising from cancer cell division. This challenge may be overcome by engineering viruses to maintain a high viral load in infected cancer cells and drawing a sustained immune response. A concern in the development of oncolytic viruses is the issue of viral tropism and infection specificity. Although some viruses have limited tropism, oncolytic viruses may be engineered to specifically target tumors using cancer-specific receptor-ligand mechanisms. Oncolytic viruses may also be used in conjunction with chimeric antigen receptor-T cell therapy to reduce immunosuppression and enhance chimeric antigen receptor-T cell infiltration of tumors. This poses a promising approach in oncology research and treatment
Extended Collective Licensing for Use of Copyrighted Works for Machine Learning
Get PDFThe fast development of generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) services—such as ChatGPT, Midjourney, Dall-E—have within a short period of time gained immense uptake and popularity. At the same time, such services have given rise to fundamental challenges from a copyright perspective. Court proceedings have been initiated in many jurisdictions on the compatibility of such services with copyright legislation.
Some scholars see the development of AI as a gradual process, to be dealt with, like earlier technologies, through incremental adaptation of the copyright framework. For others, AI represents so fundamental an innovation—a disruptive technology, a game changer, an apocalypse—that it threatens to shake copyright law to its very foundations. The Economist has described the challenges as a “battle royal.”
These technological and legal developments—and related economic consequences—have, in turn, raised political and scholarly interest in the issues at stake. For example, the World Intellectual Property Organization (“WIPO”) has dedicated studies and seminars to the topic, the Association Littéraire et Artistique Internationale (“ALAI”) 2023 Congress in Paris focused on AI and copyright, and several jurisdictions have or are considering specific provisions in copyright law of relevance to this emerging technology. Entire symposia, including this one—the Kernochan Center’s 2024 annual symposium The Past, Present and Future of Copyright Licensing—are dedicated to related copyright issues.
A copyright-related question that has gained much attention is whether the output generated by generative AI services can obtain copyright protection, and if so, who the author is. Another question, which is the focus of this contribution, is whether the use of copyright protected content as part of the “training” of the AI—i.e., machine learning—constitutes copyright-relevant use, i.e., falls within the rights protected by copyright. And if so, whether the so-called extended collective licensing model could be a relevant vehicle (or mechanism) for clearing rights for such use. Related to aspects of extended collective licensing, issues have been raised around whether there are challenges associated with competition law that need to be taken into account.
Against this backdrop, this Article is structured as follows. Section I, deals with machine learning and copyright, i.e., whether and to what extent the use of copyrightprotected content as part of the “training” of the AI (machine learning) constitutes copyright-relevant use. Section II describes and discusses whether the extended collective licensing model could be a relevant mechanism for such use. Section III focuses on some challenges from a competition law perspective, and also relates to some relevant provisions in the EU directive on collective rights management. Section IV sets out some concluding remarks
The Tax Redistribution Gap
Get PDFThe tax revenue gap—the difference between how much the IRS collects in tax revenue and how much it should collect based on the text of the Internal Revenue Code—is both well-defined and well-studied. But raising revenue is just one purpose of taxation; the tax code also operates to redistribute wealth. Drawing from the tax revenue gap and redistribution literatures, this article coins a parallel concept, the tax redistribution gap, to map the extent to which the tax system falls short of its redistributive goals.
Introducing a tax redistribution gap measure challenges background assumptions in current tax discourse: first, it would call out a reliance on pre-market income as a distributive baseline, which serves to overstate the redistributive impact of the tax code; second, it would increase the profile of redistribution among policymakers and the public—understandably, measures like the tax revenue gap and tax expenditure budgets focus dialogue on tax evasion and over-spending by the government.
Ultimately, the tax redistribution gap would provide a single measure that displays how we are falling short of a key task of the state (redistribution). And by understanding and comparing the component ways our current tax systems falls short of it intended outcomes, we can better tailor redistributive policy solutions
Mkrtičʻ Nałaš: An Armenian Bishop as Pillar of the Aqquyunlu State? : Synchronisms in the Armenian and Aqquyunlu History of Diyarbakır, 1430–1450 CE
No full textAlthough the fifteenth century CE has commonly been recognized as a crucial saddle period in both the history of the Armenian church and the administrative history of the Middle East, which is largely focused on Muslim rulers before the Ottoman-Safavid confrontation, the two topics are usually approached separately. To bridge this gap, the present contribution examines three pivotal moments in the tenure of the Armenian bishop, painter, and poet Mkrtičʻ Nałaš (d. after 1469 CE) in Diyarbakır to argue that his career was inextricably entangled with the trajectory of the Aqquyunlu “Turkmen” rulers who were establishing Diyarbakır as a regional center at the time. Accordingly, I suggest that we should see the processes of Aqquyunlu state formation as including members of the Armenian clerical elite such as Mkrtičʻ Nałaš.
I propose to use the concept of synchronisms to reflect the joint and entangled agency of multiple individuals and interpersonal networks of mobilization and patronage. This concept enables the description of entanglements and linkages without attributing primacy to any of the involved parties. I argue that the synchronisms linking Mkrtičʻ Nałaš and early Aqquyunlu rulers of Diyarbakır demonstrate that the histories of Christian clerical elites and the histories of the Muslim etatist and administrative configurations they inhabited must be told together
A COMMON PROBLEM INCREASINGLY WITHOUT A SOLUTION: The Rise of Antibiotic-Resistant Urinary Tract Infections
No full textUrinary tract infections (UTIs) are one of the most common infections globally for both inpatients and outpatients. The bacteria causing these infections, primarily E.coli, have demonstrated increasing levels of resistance to traditionally prescribed antibiotics. Contributors to this rise in resistance include over-prescription of antibiotics and poor patient compliance, both of which are affected by cultural attitudes. Incidence of antibiotic resistance is higher in areas of lower socioeconomic status (SES) due to a lack of trained medical professionals, non-prescription antibiotic use, and inadequate infrastructure for both sanitation and water distribution. To combat the spread of resistance, many health departments and physicians have begun to practice antibiotic stewardship, avoiding the prescription of antibiotics if not absolutely necessary. There has also been a movement towards prophylactic non-antibiotic remedies including cranberry juice and probiotics which, combined with antibiotic stewardship, can reduce bacterial exposure to antibiotics and thus reduce the development of resistance