46622 research outputs found
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Keynote Address by the Assistant Director for Spectrum Telecom Policy at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
Get PDFConsidering the Price-Anderson Act\u27s Federal Public Liability Action Provisions in the Future of Nuclear Fusion Power
Get PDFMembership of the House of Representatives and Committee Membership
Get PDFhttps://scholar.law.colorado.edu/colorado-house-and-senate-journals/1594/thumbnail.jp
Subject Index
Get PDFhttps://scholar.law.colorado.edu/colorado-house-and-senate-journals/1596/thumbnail.jp
Senate Sponsor List
Get PDFhttps://scholar.law.colorado.edu/colorado-house-and-senate-journals/1607/thumbnail.jp
Policies Regulating Gender in Schools: Companion to Identity by Committee (2022)
No full textThis document, Policies Regulating Gender in Schools: Companion to Identity by Committee (2022), https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1K6iUkLnmDfaSVykyRaZ3Yqt7XNM9leGO-MQA6p2VbV4/edit?usp=Sharing, was published as an electronic supplement to the article, Scott Skinner-Thompson, Identity by Committee, 57 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 657 (2022), available at https://scholar.law.colorado.edu/faculty-articles/1586
The Dark Sun Network
Get PDFClimate scientists agree that climate change will soon require the deployment of a highly dangerous geoengineering approach known as “solar radiation management.” Solar radiation management uses chemical or physical barriers to solar energy entering the atmosphere and thereby forces global temperatures downwards almost immediately by creating “artificial shade.” Problematically, the unilateral deployment of domestic solar radiation management approaches can have different and potentially devastating effects around the world, even if they help the country deploying the approach to limit the worst climate change consequences at home. So far, there is no global governance framework that can guide the development and deployment of solar radiation management. In this Article, I develop how a networked, bottom-up governance approach can resolve the current solar radiation management global governance deadlock. I argue that such bottom-up governance must be consistent with principles of nondomination developed in civic republican and postcolonial theories of consent.
I submit that the most promising way to jumpstart such a network is to lean into what appears to many as U.S. unilateralism. I argue that U.S. environmental law provides a ready model for global bottom-up solar radiation management governance coordination and collaboration in the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Air Act. Centrally, the Dark Sun Network provides a realistic and meaningful governance approach that can be scaled up immediately on the basis of existing law
The Bankruptcy of Purdue Pharma in the Wake of Big Tobacco
Get PDFTwo distinct public health crises shook the United States from 1954 to 2023: nicotine addiction from tobacco products, and opioid addiction starting with Purdue Pharmaceutical’s OxyContin. These crises resulted in millions of deaths and immense costs to the country as a whole. The nicotine crisis ended in a national settlement against four major tobacco manufacturers, which yielded hundreds of millions of dollars for those harmed by these products. The owners of Purdue, however, opted for bankruptcy instead of settlement, keeping the majority of the money made from OxyContin for Purdue’s owners, the Sackler family.
These four tobacco giants and Purdue shared an almost identical trajectory before and during the massive civil litigation that eventually forced them into settlement negotiations with thousands of injured plaintiffs. Both engaged in health misinformation campaigns intended to obscure the inherent dangers and addictive potentials of their respective products, both lobbied government actors to secure their markets, and both eventually faced civil litigation from almost every U.S. state. Despite these similarities, Purdue has avoided a settlement, leaving the public without restitution for the harms caused by OxyContin.
This Article proposes that these differences in litigation results were the direct result of the fundamental corporate differences between the publicly owned tobacco companies and the private, family-owned Purdue Pharmaceuticals. Executives in private companies are insulated from public outrage and outside interference in a way that public executives are not. Due to this insulation, private executives in general, and the Purdue executives specifically, can resort to litigation techniques that benefit the bad actors and leave nothing behind for those harmed. These corporate differences meant that the tobacco companies were forced to settle and pay appropriate restitutions to the public that they harmed, while Purdue, was able to—and did—opt for bankruptcy. Purdue’s bankruptcy left the public without compensation for harm done and allowed Purdue’s owners to enjoy civil immunity despite their direct role in the opioid crisis
Minding Accidents
Get PDFTort doctrine states that breach is all about conduct. Unlike in the criminal law context, where jurors must engage in amateur mindreading to evaluate mens rea, jurors are told that they can assess civil negligence by looking only at the defendant’s external behavior. But this is false. Here I explain why, by incorporating the psychology of foresight. Foreseeability is at the heart of negligence—appearing as the primary test for duty, breach, and proximate cause. And yet, it has been called a “vexing morass” and a “malleable standard” because it is so poorly understood. This Article refines and advances the construct of foresight by describing it as an epistemic mental state—similar to intent, knowledge, or recklessness. We cannot ask whether a defendant should have foreseen a risk without interrogating what they subjectively perceived, realized, or remembered at the time. Indeed, the focus on actions in negligence is misleading because unreasonable actions are not necessary for negligence liability, while a negligent mental state is. It is time for negligence doctrine to “mind” accidents. Unfortunately, when we assume that foreseeability can be assessed objectively through conduct, jurors are left rudderless to engage in hindsight bias. The phrasing of “objectively reasonable foreseeability” encourages jurors to superimpose what should have been foreseen ex post on what could have been foreseen ex ante. Further, while the outputs of mental states may be labeled reasonable or unreasonable, some of the underlying mental states themselves cannot be. There is no such thing as “objectively reasonable memory” or “objectively reasonable perception.” If we are committed to basing negligence on breach, we must pay more attention to whether a particular defendant is capable of foresight. This is not about eliminating the reasonable person standard, but rather recognizing that what is reasonable is constrained by what is possible. Given these insights, I propose significant revisions to negligence doctrine. I reshuffle and simplify the prima facie elements to focus the jury’s attention on the descriptive aspects of breach (i.e., whether foresight and prevention were possible in this instance) and the judge’s attention on the normative aspects (whether there should be duties imposed in cases like this and whether this particular defendant should be held responsible). This proposal aims to decrease hindsight bias by requiring an assessment of the defendant’s capacity for foresight before asking whether the outputs of this mental process were reasonable. My proposal brings to the surface processes that are already occurring. It has the added benefit of distinguishing the tests for duty, breach, and proximate cause, which at present overlap considerably. Because breach, proximate cause, and duty all ask whether the outcome was reasonably foreseeable, courts frequently conflate the breach analysis (which should be for the jury) with that of duty (for the judge). My proposal eliminates this confusion by defining descriptive elements that are uniquely for the jury and normative elements that are uniquely for the judge