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Back to Basics: The Benefits of Paradigmatic International Organizations
No full textIn the early 2000s, small “coalitions of the willing,” flexible networks, and nimble private-public partnerships were promoted as alternatives to bureaucratic, consensus-seeking, and slow-moving international organizations. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria was established as an efficient alternative to the lumbering World Health Organization. The Basel Committee, the Financial Stability Forum, and the Financial Action Task Force were lauded as global market regulators. The Pompidou Group, the Dublin Group, and Interpol were touted as effective police networks in the battle against transnational crime.
We systematically reviewed the evolution of these celebrated networks in the ensuing decades by using a broad range of primary legal sources and, to better understand the consequences of institutional design, interviewed a dozen key negotiators and staff members. We document that many networks have pursued paradigmatic international organization features: they have broadened their membership to include dissenting countries and established or expanded independent secretariats. In addition, many networks have secured privileges and immunities agreements to shield their staffs and assets. Some have discussed or made plans to transform into international organizations.
We argue that existing work on international organizations underestimates the benefits of the paradigmatic international organization form. Because international institutions must engage with multiple audiences, including different ministries in diverse countries, other international organizations, and current and future staff members, the tried-and-true package of features international organizations offer retains surprising appeal
Meeting Clean Energy Goals Will Require the Grid of the Future
No full textThe transmission grid is the critical superhighway that connects energy supply and demand. But our grid was designed for the power plants of the past—not for the diverse range of resources and technologies of our clean energy future. Over 70 percent of the nation’s transmission infrastructure is more than 25 years old, and in many areas of the country constraints have already been an impediment to renewable power. To meet greenhouse gas reduction goals, we will need to expand electric transmission systems by 60 percent by 2030 and possibly triple the capacity of these systems by 2050. The Infl ation Reduction Act has large loan guarantees to spur grid investment, but hundreds of billions more will be eventually needed
In Search of the First-Round Knockout a Rule 12(B) Primer
No full textBoxing enthusiasts define success not just by wins and losses but also by knockouts. Many of the greatest fighters in the history of boxing—Rocky Marciano, Mike Tyson, Jack Dempsey, and Sugar Ray Robinson—were known for their knockout punching power. Within the category of knockouts, the gold standard is the first-round knockout, the moment when stunned fans watch a fighter take the opponent out of the contest before either of them has broken a sweat
Locating Free and Low-Cost Secondary Sources in Michigan
Get PDFSecondary sources are all the legal resources that describe what the law is without actually having the force of law. For example, treatises, law review articles, and practice series are secondary sources while statutes, regulations, and cases are primary sources. Although secondary sources are not binding authority, they provide valuable, up-to-date insight and commentary about existing laws. These insights are especially useful when handling matters outside of an attorney’s usual areas of practice.
Unfortunately, secondary sources are not cheap — consider that a full set of Michigan Civil Jurisprudence has a retail cost of $25,119. That said, a lot of commercial legal research databases like Westlaw and LexisNexis provide access to secondary sources as part of their subscriptions. But this coverage is not comprehensive, some secondary sources are not located on either Westlaw or Lexis, and not every firm subscribes to a legal research database.
In the instances where a secondary source that you need is not available, trying to find a cost-effective alternative can be imperative. This is especially true when you need to access a secondary source only for a short amount of time and investing in the purchase of an entire book is not financially sound. In circumstances such as these, tracking down free secondary sources can be extremely useful
Privatizing Copyright
Get PDFMuch has been written, and much is understood, about how and why digital platforms regulate free expression on the internet. Much less has been written— and even much less is understood—about how and why digital platforms regulate creative expression on the internet—expression that makes use of others’ copyrighted content. While § 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act regulates user-generated content incorporating copyrighted works, just as § 230 of the Communications Decency Act regulates other user speech on the internet, it is, in fact, rarely used by the largest internet platforms—Facebook and YouTube. Instead, as this Article details, creative speech on those platforms is governed by a series of highly confidential licensing agreements with large copyright holders.
Yet despite the dominance of private contracting in ordering how millions of pieces of digital content are made and distributed on a daily basis, little is known, and far less has been written, on just what the new rules governing creative expression are. This is, in fact, by design: these license agreements contain strict confidentiality clauses that prohibit public disclosure of any and all of their contents. This Article, however, pieces together clues from publicly available court filings, news reports, and leaked documents. The picture it reveals is a world where the substantive law of copyright is being quietly rewritten. Agreements between digital platforms and rightsholders remove the First Amendment safeguard of fair use, insert a new moral right for works previously deemed ineligible for moral rights protection, and use other small provisions to influence and reshape administrative, common, and statutory copyright law. Further still, recent changes or lobbied-for changes to copyright’s public law seek to either enshrine the primacy of such private governance or altogether remove copyright rulemaking processes from government oversight, cementing the legitimacy of the new private governors.
Changing copyright’s public law to enshrine the primacy of such private governance insulates the new rules of copyright from the democratic process, transforming public participation in, and public oversight of, the laws that shape our daily lives. Creative expression on the internet now finds itself at a curious precipice: there is a seeming glut of low-cost or free content, much of it created directly by and distributed to users—yet increasingly regulated by an opaque network of rules created by a select few private parties. An understanding of the internet’s democratizing potential for creativity is incomplete without a concomitant understanding of how the new private rules of copyright may shape, and harm, that creativity
NFT for Eternity
Get PDFNon-fungible tokens (NFTs) are unique tokens stored on a digital ledger – the blockchain. They are meant to represent unique, non-interchangeable digital assets, as there is only one token with that exact data. Moreover, the information attached to the token cannot be altered as on a regular database. While copies of these digital items are available to all, NFTs are tracked on blockchains to provide the owner with proof of ownership. This possibility of buying and owning digital assets can be attractive to many individuals.
NFTs are presently at the stage of early adoption and their uses are expanding. In the future, they could become a fundamental and integral component of tomorrow’s web. NFTs bear the potential to become the engine of speech: as tokenized expressions cannot be altered or deleted, they enable complete freedom of expression, which is not subject to censorship. However, tokenized speech can also bear significant costs and risks, which can threaten individual dignity and the public interest. Anyone can tokenize a defamatory tweet, a shaming tweet, or a tweet that includes personal identifying information and these tokenized expressions can never be deleted or removed from the blockchain, risking permanent damage to the reputations of those involved. Even worse, anyone can tokenize extremist political views, such as alt-right incitement, which could ultimately result in violence against minorities, and infringe on the public interest.
To date, literature has focused on harmful speech that appears on dominant digital platforms, but has yet to explore and address the benefits, challenges and risks of tokenized speech. Such speech cannot be deleted from the web in the same way traditional internet intermediaries currently remove content. Thus, the potential influence of NFTs on freedom of expression remains unclear. This Article strives to fill the gap and contribute to literature in several ways. It introduces the idea of owning digital assets by using NFT technology, surveys the main uses of tokenizing digital assets and the benefits of such practices. It aims to raise awareness of the potential of tokenized speech to circumvent censorship and to act as the engine of freedom of expression. Yet it also addresses the challenges and risks posed by tokenized speech. Finally, it proposes various solutions and remedies for the abuse of NFT technology, which may have the potential to perpetuate harmful speech. As we are well aware of the challenges inherent in our proposals for mitigation, this Article also addresses First Amendment objections to the proposed solution
Status Manipulation in \u3cem\u3eChae Chan Ping v. United States\u3c/em\u3e
Get PDFA Review of Chae Chan Ping v. United States. By Rose Cuison-Villazor in Critical Race Judgments: Rewritten U.S. Court Opinions on Race and the Law 74, 84. Edited by Bennett Capers, Devon W. Carbado, R.A. Lenhardt and Angela Onwuachi-Willig
Akhil Amar’s Unusable Past
Get PDFA Review of The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760–1840. By Akhil Reed Amar
Nepantla/Coatlicue/Conocimiento
Get PDFA Review of Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. By Gloria Anzaldúa