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24/7 Clean Energy
Get PDFIn the face of the rapidly escalating climate crisis, the electricity sector is moving toward renewable energy. To date, policies and strategies have focused on increasing overall renewable energy generation, with little regard for timing and location. The result has been a misalignment of supply and demand in renewable energy markets. Renewable power projects produce energy when and where it is least expensive, leaving supply scarce at other times and places. Consumers, meanwhile, continue to use power when and where they need it. This mismatch increases the electricity grid’s dependence on fossil fuel–fired electricity to meet electricity demand at times and places when renewable power remains scarce. For electricity consumers to escape their dependence on carbon-emitting energy sources, renewable energy markets must incentivize generation of power when and where people and businesses need electricity. Policies and strategies that employ the emerging concept of 24/7 clean energy can address the existing mismatch by aligning generation and usage on an hourly basis so that renewable energy meets the full electricity needs of the U.S. economy. This Article explains how existing renewable energy policies and strategies have created a mismatch between renewable energy generation and use; how that misalignment distorts renewable energy markets and impedes efforts to decarbonize the electricity sector; how 24/7 clean energy can address the misalignment problem; and how policies and strategies can support the development of 24/7 clean energy
Sex Exceptionalism in Criminal Law
Get PDFSex crimes are the worst crimes. People generally believe that sexual assault is graver than nonsexual assault, uninvited sexual compliments are worse than nonsexual insults, and sex work is different from work. Criminal codes typically create a dedicated category for sex offenses, uniting under its umbrella conduct ranging from violent attacks to consensual commercial transactions. This exceptionalist treatment of sex as categorically different rarely elicits discussion, much less debate. Sex exceptionalism, however, is neither natural nor neutral, and its political history should give us pause. This Article is the first to trace, catalog, and analyze sex exceptionalism in criminal law in the United States. Through a genealogical examination of sex-crime law from the late eighteenth century to today, it makes several novel contributions to the debate over how criminal law should regulate sex.
First, this Article casts doubt on the conventional account that rape law’s history is solely one of sexist tolerance, an account that undergirds contemporary calls for broader criminal regulations and higher sentences. In fact, early law established rape as the most heinous crime and a fate worse than death, but it did so to preserve female chastity, marital morality, and racial supremacy. Sex-crime laws were not uniformly underenforced but rather selectively enforced—a tool used to entrench hierarchies and further oppressive regimes from slavery to social purity. Second, this Article employs this history to suggest that it is past time to critically examine whether sex crimes should be exceptional. Indeed, in the 1960s and 1970s, the enlightened liberal position was that rape law should be less exceptional and harmonized with the law governing “ordinary” assault.
Third, this Article spotlights the invisible but powerful influence sex exceptionalism exerts on scholarship and advocacy. Sex exceptionalism has flourished despite the liberal critique, and today it is adopted without hesitation. Sex dazzles theorists of all types. For sex crimes, retributivists accept exorbitant sentences, utilitarians tolerate ineffective ones, and critics of mass incarceration selectively abandon their principled stance against expanding the penal state. Denaturalizing sex exceptionalism and excavating its troubling origins forces analysts to confront a detrimental frame underlying society’s perpetual enthusiasm for punitive sex regulation
Getting to Trustworthiness (But Not Necessarily to Trust)
Get PDFAs ethicist and political scientist Russell Hardin observed, our willingness to trust an actor generally turns on our own experience with, and thus our own perceptions of, that actor’s motives and that actor’s competence. Changes over time and technology can alter our experience with a particular actor and thus our willingness to trust or distrust that actor.
This symposium essay focuses not on how to encourage the public to trust the media, but instead on how the media’ can behave in trustworthy ways--in other words, how its choices can demonstrate its trustworthy motives and competence. Examples include refusing to amplify destructive behavior. Disclosing data sources, evidence sets, the personal data that the media collects from its users and what it does with it. Demonstrating epistemic humility, by, for example, investing in self-education about scientific and other technical matters. Seeking out and responding to public feedback and scrutiny
Unequal Homes, Unequal Health: Applying the Loss of Chance Doctrine to Landlord-Tenant Cases
No full textLow-income families and families of color in the U.S. are disproportionately likely to live in homes that are negligently maintained by landlords, with significant implications for their physical health. Despite suffering harm, tenants often cannot seek legal relief without ruling out all possible alternate causes of their injuries. For example, if a tenant develops asthma after being exposed to black mold in her home and can show that her landlord had knowingly refused to remediate the mold, the tenant would still be barred from relief if she were genetically predisposed to developing asthma or could have also been exposed to asthma-inducing toxins elsewhere.
This Article argues that the loss of chance doctrine, which has historically been used in medical malpractice cases where a doctor misdiagnoses a terminally ill patient and thereby reduces his or her likelihood of survival, should be extended to these types of landlord-tenant toxic tort cases. In misdiagnosis loss of chance, the patient would likely have not survived his or her illness regardless of the doctor\u27s negligence, making it impossible to prove that the misdiagnosis caused the patient\u27s death. Using the loss of chance doctrine, plaintiffs can rely on large-scale data, such as survival rates in the aggregate population, to establish causation instead.
Under the expanded loss of chance doctrine proposed here, tenants would be able to use public health data that shows the negative effect of poor housing conditions on health outcomes in the same way. This expansion would allow for relief even if a plaintiff cannot definitively rule out all alternate causes of his or her injury. This would be an important step forward in holding landlords accountable and reducing economic and racial housing quality disparities
The Private Enforcement of National Security
Get PDFThe private enforcement of public law is a central feature of the American administrative state. As various scholars have argued, the federal government depends upon private parties to enforce public laws through litigation in order to achieve the government’s regulatory objectives. This scholarship has, however, largely overlooked the phenomenon of private enforcement in the national security arena. This Article seeks to describe and analyze national security’s private enforcement for the first time. In doing so, it explores what national security’s private enforcement reveals about the costs of private enforcement more broadly. In particular, this Article identifies an important downside to private enforcement that existing literature has largely ignored—namely its potential to reinforce the state’s “despotic powers” and “despotic purposes.” Despotic power represents the state’s ability to do as it pleases without being accountable or responsive to all or certain members of society. Despotic purpose focuses on the state’s pursuit of illiberal policies and practices. National security’s private enforcement demonstrates how private enforcement can promote the government’s despotic purposes and powers by reinforcing state policies that undermine civil liberties and target communities that are marginalized and have little say or control over the government’s actions
