Mitchell Hamline School of Law
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Time to Mail It In? A Survey of 2020 Voting Rights Issues in Arkansas and Recommendations for More Inclusive Elections
Get PDFThe highly contagious COVID-19 pandemic, combined with over fifty lawsuits brought by former President Donald Trump, made the general election of 2020 one of the most controversial in the history of the United States. Accusations of voter disenfranchisement proliferated across the nation and were initiated by members of both sides of the political spectrum, even before Election Day. Arkansas was no exception to this rule. In 2020, multiple Arkansas lawsuits highlighted the weaknesses of the state’s voter infrastructure, particularly with regard to the absentee ballot process. Voting-by-mail was particularly important in the pandemic year when long lines became a public health danger, and Arkansans requested absentee ballots at a rate that was three times more than the prior general election. Perhaps it should be no surprise that voter participation in Arkansas was at an all-time low of 55.5%, placing it at 50th in the nation for election turnout. This Article explores 1) the voter suppression features of the Arkansas election infrastructure, and 2) more inclusive methods of voting—such as universal mail-in ballots and internet-based voting—which could be adopted in Arkansas
How The Safe Drinking Water Act & The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act Fail Emerging Contaminants: A Per- and Polyfluoralkyl Substances (PFAS) Case Study
Get PDFThe Means and Ends of Wellness Programs
Get PDFHow far should we go in assigning individuals causal responsibility for their own health status and what should the implications of any such assignment be?
Few would deny that most adults have a major role in achieving and maintaining their own health. However, it is not at all clear where one should draw the line between what is freely chosen and what is determined by forces outside a person’s control. Medical care plays only a small role in most people’s overall health, and often social, environmental, and personal factors are far more important. Incentivizing an individual to take better care of her health by adding incentives or penalties to her health coverage, even if done as reasonably as possible, may be far less effective than altering key social and environmental factors that are strongly linked to health status.
Altering health coverage to include wellness incentives in an effort to manipulate individual behavior is a problematic trend. On the one hand, including such incentives ostensibly furthers the principle of distributive justice by encouraging individuals to take more responsibility for their health. But, on the other hand, such incentives not only misconstrue the purpose of coverage, but also arguably create an injustice by inappropriately elevating individual responsibility for health while ignoring the larger, systemic contributors to chronic diseases and conditions. Consequently, this injustice is harmful to all of us. Making access to health coverage contingent on health improvement efforts decreases access to health care services by making it more difficult or costly for individuals to obtain, retain, and use coverage, and inappropriately and disproportionately burdens the more vulnerable, without outweighing benefits. This practice focuses attention away from the larger causes of the problems, while blaming individuals for matters that are not completely within their control.
This article will examine these issues as they manifest in private and public coverage in the form of employer-sponsored wellness programs and Medicaid personal responsibility requirements. Part I will examine the history and increasing devolution of responsibility for health onto individuals through changes in employer-sponsored wellness programs and personal responsibility requirements in Medicaid programs. Part II will examine ethical considerations regarding these changes. The article will conclude by showing that the degree to which we currently allocate responsibility for health onto individual behavior versus the government is ethically problematic and likely to lead to poor societal and financial outcomes. Individual choice has a role to play, but only in concert with collective legal action on larger policy issues
Navigating the Legal Challenges of COVID-19 Vaccine Policies in Private Employment: School Vaccination Laws Provide a Roadmap
Get PDFTorts: Sacrificing Individual Recovery for Media Protection—Larson v. Gannett Co., 940 N.W.2d 120 (Minn. 2020)
Get PDFSuggested Improvements to Mandatory Mediation Scheduling during International Trade Commission (ITC) Section 337 Investigations
Get PDFMitchell Hamline School of Law Summer 2020 Covid-19 Legal Response Clinic
Get PDFThis essay is a reflection on lawyering in a time of crisis. It details the Mitchell Hamline School of Law Clinical Faculty’s response to the community needs resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic by creating the COVID-19 Legal Response Clinic. It also recounts the impact of the murder of George Floyd and the long overdue national reckoning with systemic racism, sparked in our city. Additionally, against this backdrop, it examines the trauma-informed approach taken in clinical work and the classroom to help students process their own trauma and apply this approach in their work with clients.
Amid these concurrent crises in our city and country, five clinicians and eleven law students came together through the COVID-19 Legal Response Clinic to serve the community, working on a variety of issues including domestic violence, unemployment, workplace safety, and conditional medical release from prison. With the passage of time, this essay reflects, one year later, on the experience of renewed purpose and optimism through caring for our community, our students, and each other in an otherwise dark and challenging time
Data as the New Oil: A Slippery Slope of Trade Secret Implications Greased by the California Consumer Privacy Act
Get PDFFollowing the European model of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the state of California implemented the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) on January 1, 2020. The CCPA allows any California consumer to demand to see all of the information that a company has saved on them; consumers can also request a full list of all the third parties that their data is shared with, sold to, and for what commercial purpose. This paper reviews the implications of a new law on the disclosure of trade secrets like client lists and algorithms that manipulate consumers’ data. Ultimately, the issue comes down to which rights are more important: personal privacy or trade privacy
