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A Hard Look at Portfolio-Focused Stewardship: Amanda M. Rose
Get PDFFinancially motivated diversified investors want to maximize the overall value of their portfolio and are not independently concerned with the performance of any given portfolio firm. A growing number of scholars have concluded that index fund managers should therefore engage in stewardship designed to force portfolio firms to internalize the costs their activities impose on other portfolio firms (“portfolio-focused stewardship”). This seemingly provides a financial justification for SEC-mandated disclosure on ESG topics—ESG disclosures concerning how a firm’s activities affect the broader economy might help index fund managers identify and, through stewardship, force the internalization of intraportfolio externalities, leading to increases in risk-adjusted portfolio value. This Article critically examines whether, and under what circumstances, financially motivated diversified investors would want their index fund managers to engage in portfolio-focused stewardship, paying careful attention to the real-world frictions that cast doubt on the likelihood that portfolio-focused stewardship would lead to net gains in risk-adjusted portfolio value as well as the alternative tools available to diversified investors for addressing intraportfolio externalities. The analysis has important implications for contemporary debates over SEC-mandated ESG disclosure as well as index fund managers’ fiduciary responsibilities
Come As You Are?: Democratizing Healthcare Through Black Church-Telehealth Initiatives
Get PDFDrawing from the phrase “come as you are,” which is frequently used in Black Churches to encourage and welcome people to church spaces for spiritual restoration and healing irrespective of their various social and economic dispositions, this Article aims to describe how telehealth partnerships with community organizations, such as Black Churches, can help democratize healthcare.
In this project, I develop two models for Black Church-Telehealth Initiatives—a Telehealth Clinic on the Church’s campus and a Designated Telehealth Space with the requisite technology to facilitate telehealth encounters—to argue that Black Church-Telehealth Initiatives can help address certain social determinants of health, such as medical mistrust and the digital divide. The Telehealth Clinic would be a licensed medical facility where patients are assisted by medical personnel with seeing a remote physician via the appropriate technology (e.g., computer, video conference software, internet access, and medical devices to obtain certain biometric data). The Designated Telehealth Space, on the other hand, would be a room equipped with non-medical technology that is open to community members without access to the requisite technology for telehealth encounters.
Black Churches are already important locations for promoting healthcare and can help further democratize healthcare via telehealth, if certain legal hurdles can be resolved. By exploring federal and state law and policy, I examine the legal barriers to telehealth expansion in general, and legal hurdles specific to these initiatives. This Article argues that federalism principles and widespread variation amongst state laws on physician licensure may make it more difficult to democratize healthcare via telehealth. Moreover, depending on the extent of the religious affiliation, Black Church-Telehealth Initiatives may fit into broader trends toward an increased alignment of healthcare institutions with religious organizations and their doctrines. Finally, legal and policy reforms are needed to address certain federal and state limitations on Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement, which may deter healthcare providers from collaborating with Black Churches to establish this Article’s initiatives. This makes the need for regulatory reform urgent. Indeed, as healthcare organizations partner with community organizations to expand access to telehealth, creative legal solutions will be required to subject those community organizations to important health laws and policies—including medical privacy and confidentiality laws—without stifling innovation and collaboration
Gene-Centric Laws in the Postgenomic Era: The Need for Protection of Epigenetic Information
Get PDFIn recent decades, special attention has been given to the privacy and discrimination risks associated with genetic information. Federal, state, and international laws all contain specific protections for the use of genetic information in a variety of contexts, including insurance and employment. Yet the very considerations motivating special protections for genetic information extend beyond mere genetics. Epigenetics involves the study of heritable changes in gene function that do not involve changes in the DNA sequence. Epigenetic data shares a number of normative similarities and policy concerns with genetic data, and in some ways, presents an even greater privacy and nondiscrimination risk than genetic data. However, epigenetic information remains unprotected by existing genetic privacy and nondiscrimination laws, which are based on an outdated conception of health and disease, focused narrowly on genes and genetic information. This Note argues that epigenetic information warrants the same protections as genetic information and calls for an amendment of existing genetic privacy and nondiscrimination laws to broaden the definitions of the data at stake to encompass epigenetic and other postgenomic information
Focusing On Fine-Tuning: Understanding The Four Pathways For Shaping Generative AI
Get PDFThose who design and deploy generative AI models, such as Large Language Models like GPT-4 or image diffusion models like Stable Diffusion, can shape model behavior in four distinct stages: pretraining, fine-tuning, in-context learning, and input and output filtering. The four stages differ among many dimensions, including cost, access, and persistence of change. Pretraining is always very expensive and in-context learning is nearly costless. Pretraining and fine-tuning change the model in a more persistent manner, while in-context learning and filters make less durable alterations. These are but two of many such distinctions reviewed in this Essay.
Legal scholars, policymakers, and judges need to understand the differences between the four stages as they try to shape and direct what these models do. Although legal and policy interventions can (and probably will) occur during all four stages, many will best be directed at the fine-tuning stage. Fine-tuning will often represent the best balance between power, precision, and disruption of the approaches
Between Death and Rebirth: Visual and Religious Intermediates in Chinese Ten Kings of Hell Paintings
Get PDFIn some schools of Chinese Buddhism, it was believed that after death, the deceased passed through the courts of the Ten Kings of Hell before being reborn. Paintings depicting this theme act as manifestations of the kings’ courts, instilling fear in the viewer through their vivid depictions of the king as a judge overseeing the torture of the deceased. Existing scholarship on the Ten Kings focuses on the iconography and style of Tang (618-907) and Song (960-1279) dynasty examples, emphasizing a compositional evolution from the iconographic and narrative, scripture-based modes, to the hanging scroll format, where each king is represented in his own court. However, limited surviving paintings from the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) leave a gap in the understanding of the Ten Kings and Buddhist hell during this time period.
Using a five Ming dynasty Ten Kings of Hell scrolls at the Harvard Art Museums, I argue that religious contexts, visual characteristics, and intermedial references within these paintings embody the notion of the intermediate. Hell in Chinese Buddhism is a state of intermediate existence; I first discuss the ritual contexts and religious iconographies of these paintings as visualizing the passage between death and rebirth. Next, I analyze the visual and stylistic characteristics of the Harvard set, assessing how pictorial motifs are arranged and recycled throughout the set in a formula that allows the paintings to convey the notion of a liminal, intermediate space. Finally, I discuss how the pigments in the Harvard set perform reference textiles and decorative arts of the Ming dynasty; these period-specific references mediate the experience of the viewer by creating a convincing and comprehensible vision of hell
Laughing All the Way To the Bench: The Role of Humor in Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings
Get PDFSupreme Court confirmation hearings serve a unique role in our government: they are the only instances where future Justices and their judicial philosophies are televised and subject to the scrutiny of not only the Senate, but also the public. Especially as judicial nominations become increasingly politicized and polarized, appearing trustworthy, likeable, and sensible becomes essential to nominees’ candidacy. Humor thus arms judges with the ability to volunteer positive information, appear humble, showcase values, lighten difficult topics and otherwise bond with Senators. Perhaps more saliently, it enables them to dodge, correct, or mock contentious or unflattering lines of questioning. By studying when, why, and how nominees use humor, we can get a glimpse into their future jurisprudence and decisions on the Bench: avoiding a topic or making light of a question may seem harmless in the hearing, but can actually reveal a nominee’s position on an issue and serve an important truth-telling role