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Unmet Legal Needs as Health Injustice
Get PDFIn Part I, this Article examines the health justice framework through which laws are understood as determinants of health equity. In Part II, this Article argues that when unaddressed for low-income individuals, legal needs serve as social determinants of health. Applying the health justice framework, the Article examines the major domains of social determinants of health (“SDOH”) and identifies areas of law for which unmet legal needs contribute to poor health and health inequity. Specifically, it analyzes how the five major domains of SDOH of the Healthy People 2030 paradigm of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (“HHS”) implicate legal issues in the fundamental area of human need identified as critical for access to counsel by the ABA. This Part explores the exacerbation and urgency of these challenges created by the pandemic and examines racial inequities driven by structural racism that create a compounding burden of health disparities for people who are both low-income and people of color. In line with the health justice framework’s exploration of how law can be leveraged to mitigate inequities, Part II concludes by examining how legal representation can address fundamental legal needs that affect health, providing support for access to counsel in these areas.
Finally, in Part III, this Article engages with potential critiques of an emphasis on individual legal representation as a downstream and overly individualistic approach to health justice. This Part addresses these critiques and argues that individual legal representation to enforce extant laws is required for health justice to address the immediate, health-harming legal issues affecting individuals from marginalized communities and improve their health and well-being. However, even though such individual legal advocacy is necessary, it is insufficient. Instead, legal representation should be used as a platform for advocacy in pursuit of structural change through law, policy, and systems reform. This Article proposes a multitiered, integrated clients-to-policy approach for lawyers to facilitate health justice to improve the health of individuals and pursue structural reform to address health equity up-stream
Make Some Sense of Scent Trademarks: The United States Needs a Graphical Representation Requirement
Get PDFWhen it comes to consumer loyalty, some businesses have decided to go beyond attracting the eyes. Why not keep customers via their nostrils? Accordingly, the scent marketing industry is booming. Jennifer Dublino, Vice President of Development at ScentWorld Events, remarks that “smell is one of the most unique of human senses. Scent enters the limbic system [of the brain] and bypasses all of the cognitive and logical thought processes and goes directly to the emotional and memory areas of the brain.” Companies like ScentAir have been created specifically to help stores design fragrances that best fit their image and objectives as a way to increase returns on investment.
Science indicates that olfactory cues are more effective than visual cues at triggering memory. Scents’ strong ties to memory and emotions can make them a powerful branding tool. A study found that gamblers spent forty-five percent more money when there was a floral scent present around a slot machine than when there was not. Four hundred consumers, who were surveyed after shoppingin a Nike store, reported that a “pleasant ambient scent” improved not only their evaluation of the store and its products but the likelihood they would shop there again. Some human rights activists have even suggested that using scents to identify goods could be beneficial to those who are visually impaired and are not able to reap the benefits of visual trademarks.6 Overall, scents appear to both attract customers and increase their affinity to a particular good or service from a specific source, much like a mesmerizing logo or catchy slogan
Localizing content: The roles of technical & professional communicators and machine learning in personalized chatbot responses
Get PDFThis study demonstrates that microcontent, a snippet of personalized content that responds to users’ needs, is a form of localization reliant on a content ecology. In contributing to users’ localized experiences, technical communicators should recognize their work as part of an assemblage in which users, content, and metrics augment each other to produce personalized content that can be consumed by and delivered through artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted technology
Unpacking the Census
Get PDFUnpacking the Census, a partnership between the Virginia Center for Inclusive Communities and the University of Richmond’s Bonner Center for Civic Engagement, School of Professional & Continuing Studies, and Spatial Analysis Lab, examines structural inequality through census research. Data for the charts, tables, and maps are the most recent from the U.S. Census, American Community Survey (ACS), 2016-2020, Five-Year Estimates
Chinese Celebrities’ Political Signaling on Weibo
Get PDFIn China, celebrities can dominate public discourse and shape popular culture, but they are under the state’s close gaze. Recent studies have revealed how the state disciplines and co-opts celebrities to promote patriotism, foster traditional values, and spread political propaganda. However, how do celebrities adapt to the changing political environment? Focusing on political signaling on Weibo, we analyze a novel dataset and find that the vast majority of top celebrities repost from official accounts of government agencies and state media outlets, though there are variations. Younger celebrities with more followers tend to repost from official accounts more. Celebrities from Taiwan tend to repost less than those from the mainland and Hong Kong, despite being subject to the same rules. However, the frequent political signaling by the most influential celebrities among younger generations suggests that the state has co-opted celebrity influence on social media to broadly promote its political objectives
Inheriting Privilege
Get PDFAll families may be created equal, so to speak. But differences between families in terms of economic wealth, resource networks, and access to cultural capital are both severe and stark. A large part of what shapes this scenery of economic possibility is the legal framework of wealth transfer. Wealth travels through generations and sticks, crystallizing in predictable places and shapes, thereby embedding complex forms of inequality within and between families. The family trust, in particular, is a mode of transfer that facilitates wealth preservation as well as wealth inequality. Family trusts are tailored to convey and defend complex patrimonies in ways that no other form of wealth transfer can do. Wills, the other most common form of wealth transfer, do not have the same functionality and can only effectuate a one-time transfer, making it difficult to exert long-term control over beneficiaries.This Article’s primary goal is to excavate the myriad ways in which the family trust is a driver of inequality by explaining the family trust’s plasticity and ability to bend to the needs of high-wealth families. The Article accomplishes this by demonstrating how the family trust facilitates not only wealth inequality but also social and cultural inequality. These explorations into complex inequality and its furtherance by the family trust are useful because they help us better appreciate the significant role that family trusts play in the evolving story of class, gender, and race privilege in the United States. Attending to the practices and possibilities of the family trust also leads us to a better understanding of how trust reform might begin to dislocate the family trust from its central positioning within the legal architecture of inequality. Ultimately, the family trust does not have to be coextensive with elite family advantage; it can be reimagined to work on behalf of communities that are economically vulnerable and historically dispossessed
The Case for Subsidizing Harm: Constrained and Costly Pigouvian Taxation with Multiple Externalities
Get PDFMany activities are subsidized despite generating negative externalities. Examples include needle exchanges and energy production subsidies. We explain this phenomenon by developing a model in which the policymaker faces constraints or costs. We highlight three examples. First, it may be optimal to subsidize a harmful activity if the policymaker cannot set the first-best tax on an externally harmful substitute. Second, it may be optimal to subsidize a harmful production process if the activity mix at lower levels of output uses more harmful activities than the activity mix at higher levels of output. Third, it may be optimal to subsidize a harmful activity if there is a large administrative cost associated with taxing a harmful substitute. We also show how the functional form of the cost of administering a Pigouvian tax affects the optimal tax. When administrative cost is a function of only tax rates, the policymaker should tax each activity. However, an increase in the tax presents a tradeoff: lower externality, but higher administrative cost. A subsidy may be optimal for some externally harmful activities. When administrative cost is a function of only activity levels, it may not be optimal to tax every activity. If it is optimal to tax all of the activities, the policymaker should set the tax equal to the externality plus the marginal administrative cost. If it is not optimal to tax every activity, the complementarity between activities comes into play and it may be optimal to subsidize externally harmful activities
Reckoning with Structural Racism in Legal Education: Methods Toward a Pedagogy of Antiracism
Get PDFThere is an empty quality to much of what passes as “diversity, equity, and inclusion” work in legal education. Despite a robust body of scholarship on teaching law consistent with the goals of antiracism, many legal educators struggle to put theory into practice. This Article responds to that struggle, offering a holistic, methodical approach to a pedagogy of antiracism whose goal is twofold: create conditions in which racially minoritized students learn to their full potential, free from the harms of traditional legal education; and equip all students, regardless of identity, to contribute to the dismantlement of structural racism. Absent such pedagogy, legal educators fail to carry out our commitments to students and to equal justice under law, and ignore central duties imposed by ABA accreditation standards. Those standards require an educational setting where all students can learn and, ultimately, become practitioners who carry out what the Model Rules of Professional Conduct call the “special responsibility for the quality of justice.”
Specifically, this Article describes a five-part pedagogy of antiracism that may be used by legal educators of all experience levels, together with a variety of concrete strategies for putting it into practice. While this methodological superstructure may take somewhat different forms depending on an educator’s identity and experience, its core strategies include: (A) understanding antiracism and developing cultural proficiency; (B) understanding and accounting for students’ identities and experiences; (C) teaching substance truthfully and in context; (D) implementing inclusive teaching processes; and (E) being actively accountable for choices and harms. By adopting this pedagogy in ways both intentional and continual, law teachers have the potential to counteract the effects of structural racism and contribute to conditions for its dismantlement