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Addressing Vaccination Hesitancy
Get PDFThis note examines the United States’ vaccination policy in comparison to other countries’ policies. Throughout Europe and in certain states in the United States, vaccination requirements are tightening, and citizens are expected to comply with more stringent requirements. The past year has brought new outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases in the United States and Europe, which has led to a push against the anti-vaccine movement and for stronger vaccination policies. However, the likelihood of a federally mandated immunization program emerging in the United States, like those in Europe and China, is low. The best policies to encourage vaccination compliance are to increase effective education about the high benefits and low costs of vaccines; and make the process of obtaining an exemption more difficult. A policy that emphasizes education and fewer exemptions would produce greater immunities from diseases without the backlash that mandatory requirements would create. Such policy would place the choice to vaccinate in the informed hands of the American people, promoting both individual autonomy and protecting public health. This note was written before the COVID-19 pandemic and reflects data, statistics, and analysis that predates the outbreak
A Tale of Two Systems: a Comparative Analysis of Scotland’s Community-Based Juvenile Justice and America’s Prosecutorial Discretion Laws
Get PDFAmerica’s juvenile justice system’s most notable shift came in the 1980s when states deferred the power to prosecute children in adult courts to prosecutors. Prosecutorial discretion over juvenile cases was a rather dormant power, exercised in less than 2% of juvenile cases across the country until the early 2000s. Over the last five years, in response to a growing call to exercise the full power of America’s punitive justice system, states broadened the prosecutor’s discretionary powers. In some cases, prosecutors were given the full discretion to direct file children into adult courts — a decision that could not be reviewed or blocked by a judge. But as America grabbles with a shifted focus on punishing child offenders, Scotland embraces its own revolutionary juvenile justice system. Nearly fifty years ago, Scotland abandoned its juvenile justice system and traded punitive juvenile courts for community-based justice. Since then, Scotland’s juvenile justice program evolved into a nation-wide project that shifted the country’s perspective and approaches toward juvenile crime. This paper dives into the history and details behind America’s prosecutorial discretion laws and Scotland’s community-based justice system. Then, by analyzing implications, I argue America’s punitive justice system should opt for a more rehabilitative system approach to juvenile justice; a system that mirrors Scotland’s effective, and inherently just, nationwide approach
India’s Citizenship Amendment Act Violates International Human Rights
Get PDFThe Citizenship Amendment Act, recently passed legislation, comes on the heels of a very tumultuous number of years, months, and weeks in India. Most notably, Muslim communities and citizens fear the upheaval of their way of life due to the decisions of the Hindu-majority who controls the political actions of the democratic republic. These Muslim groups are not the only worried parties. International humanitarian bodies have spoken out against various recent actions of India’s government. The Citizenship Amendment Act, if considered in the context of other actions by the governing party in India, should be understood as violative of International human rights laws and norms. India is subject to the standards set in United Nations (UN) documents because it is party to covenants and declarations. This paper discusses the formation of the UN bodies, which later promulgated such treaties and declarations. It discusses the evolution of UN human rights law, how it has applied in the past, and how it could be applied to the current situation in India and its enactment of the Citizenship Amendment Act. Moreover, this paper will review the India’s current events and how recent history gave rise to the issues of religious intolerance that exist there, at present. In short, this paper concludes that there is a persuasive argument that India’s Citizenship Amendment Act violates international human rights laws and norms.
Teaching Written Advocacy in a Law Clinic Setting
Get PDFWritten advocacy is a critical lawyering skill and vital component of student work in many clinics. This is certainly true in appellate advocacy and policy-based clinics, such as my own focused on human rights advocacy. Teaching written advocacy requires a deliberate and thoughtful pedagogy, just as with other aspects of clinical teaching. There is a rich literature on teaching legal writing, but only sparse discussion of its applicability in the fast-paced law clinic setting, where written products have real world consequences and need to be of high quality. This article delves into this literature and argues that written advocacy consists of three core components: writing strategically, writing logically, and writing with heart. Teaching written advocacy thus entails supporting students in shifting into a mindset of persuasive writing, strengthening argument coherence, and developing narratives that resonate with an audience. This article then proposes supervision and feedback methods to strengthen each core component, identifying lessons from the literature for the law clinic context, as well as engaging in self-reflection and assessment of techniques with which our Human Rights Clinic is currently experimenting
Climate-Induced Human Displacement and Conservation Lands
Get PDFAs climate change leads to both internal displacement and mass migrations, we need not only new places for people to live but also new locations for infrastructure projects and other public needs. Some of the most attractive areas for these new land uses are currently unoccupied land, including land set aside for conservation. Numerous laws restrict the availability and possible uses of public conservation land. Individual agreements and property restrictions encumber private conservation land, varying in the ease with which the restrictions can be modified. For example, privately protected areas in the United States are often encumbered with perpetual conservation easements. The rigid rules of such protected areas combined with the increased number of private interests involved make them legally unattractive for land-use change even when they might be socially desirable locations for settlement. This Article examines opportunities and constraints for expanded use of conservation lands to meet climate migrant needs. I explore how these areas could respond to needs that develop in the context of climate change migration and illustrate the dangers of overly rigid land-use laws. Policy makers and conservationists should consider these tensions when drafting agreements and laws
Notice: Aircraft Lien Law in Florida
Get PDFEstablishing (e.g., perfecting) and enforcing a lien presents technical pitfalls and practical problems with which practitioners and courts are often unfamiliar or uncomfortable. After all, the law of liens requires an understanding of many different areas of the law, including the law of contract, bailment, unjust enrichment, and customary law. But among the most fraught with uncertainty are mechanic’s liens, which establish a right in favor of persons—“artisans”—performing or furnishing labor, services, fuel, or material upon personal property. Florida’s mechanic’s lien statute raises particularly challenging legal issues as applied to aircraft. In Florida, the perfection and enforcement of a mechanic’s lien as against an aircraft is rarely plain or intuitive. To get from lien perfection to lien foreclosure, aviation and commercial law practitioners must travel from Florida’s general mechanic’s lien statute through a mosaic of other state statutes, including a standalone chapter related to aviation. Along the way, equitable considerations, like the need for injunctive relief and the law of replevin and tort (e.g., conversion), likely come into play. Finally, lienors must satisfy an exacting federal statutory recording scheme and navigate a corresponding body of decisional law that raises thorny issues of federalism, priority, and preemption.The final tally: Perfection and enforcement of a mechanic’s lien in Florida requires the command of a minimum of four different Florida statutory chapters that rarely (and rarely clearly) cross-reference each other, several federal statutes that frequently have no obvious relationship to state lien law, and scattered decisional law rendered at every level of the judiciary. This is to say nothing of the international law regime governing the registration of airplanes and airplane parts or the likelihood that an aircraft may already be encumbered by the lien or priority mechanisms of another state or states. But the most problematic aspect of Florida’s statutory regime for mechanic’s liens, which is at the center of this Article, is the role possession plays in perfecting aircraft liens. Possession typically plays a decisive role in the area of lien law, animating the common law tenet that “possession is nine points of the law.” For more than a decade, however, Florida statutory law has presented an internally conflicted path toward lien perfection by also providing that possession is unnecessary. That is, under Florida law, a valid lien also could be created simply by recording a claim of lien. Recently, however, the Florida Legislature amended chapter 329, Florida Statutes, to clarify that possession is not required for lien perfection purposes; notice alone now suffices.This Article discusses the possession versus notice problem inherent in the state’s statutory scheme and then analyzes the recent change to the law. In doing so, this Article evaluates the advantages and disadvantages of Florida’s “new” mechanism for the perfection and enforcement of mechanic’s lien on aircraft, and argues in favor a statutory scheme that once and for all takes aircraft outside of Florida’s general mechanic’s lien statute, situating the subject of aircraft liens in a legal scheme that comprehensively provides for the perfection and enforcement of aircraft-specific artisan liens. Finally, this Article provides a comprehensive empirical review of the mechanic’s lien laws of every state in order to broadly contextualize how legislatures and courts around the nation approach the issue of perfection and notice for lien perfection purposes. In all, this Article’s relevance is greatest for aviation practitioners and courts adjudicating aviation liens in Florida and elsewhere, but it may also hold interest for a wider audience seeking to achieve efficiencies in the interpretation and application of commercial and secured transactions concerning personal property and mobile assets in analogous situations
Cruise Contracts, Public Policy, and Foreign Forum Selection Clauses
Get PDFA cruise ship contract is the prototypical contract of adhesion. The passenger is presented with the contract on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. If she refuses to sign, the ship sails without her. To ensure that cruise companies do not draft one-sided contracts that are unfair to passengers, Congress has enacted a number of statutes that regulate these agreements. One such statute is 46 U.S.C. § 30509. This law stipulates that any contract provision that limits the liability of the cruise company for personal injury or death is void as against public policy if the ship stops at a U.S. port. In recent years, cruise companies have sought to develop a workaround to this rule for non-U.S. residents. The workaround involves (1) a foreign forum selection clause, and (2) a foreign choice-of-law clause. When a suit is filed against the cruise company in U.S. court, the company will invoke the foreign forum selection clause and ask for the case to be dismissed. When the case is refiled in the foreign court, the cruise company will then argue that the choice-of-law clause compels the application of the Athens Convention, an international treaty that caps the liability of cruise companies in negligence cases. In this way, the companies seek to use forum selection clauses and choice-of-law clauses in tandem to achieve a goal—limiting their tort liability to passengers via contract—that would ordinarily be prohibited by 46 U.S.C. § 30509. This workaround should not work. Indeed, there are dozens of cases where U.S. courts have refused to enforce forum selection clauses in analogous situations. In 2012, however, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit expressly blessed the use of the workaround in cruise ship contracts. This Article first critiques this Eleventh Circuit decision and identifies its many shortcomings. It then draws upon analogous cases from other areas of U.S. law to propose a new analytical framework for evaluating when the courts should and should not enforce foreign forum selection clauses in cruise ship contracts
Bill AB5 and the Gig Economy
Get PDFThis paper explores California Assembly Bill No. 5 and its effect on the “gig economy.” Notably, this paper takes an in-depth look at companies providing cheap services to California residents and the detrimental effects on California business models by labeling independent contractors as employees. I will contrast the Bill with previous California court decisions on independent contracts and the joint ballot initiatives being jointly proposed by Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and other gig companies. Within this paper I will refer to workers as “drivers” for the sake of simplicity; however, it should be noted that these companies refer to them as “independent service providers” in an attempt to distance themselves from an employee classification.1 Additionally, I will outline the current legal attempts taken by Uber to prevent the Bill from going into effect. Lastly, I will speculate as to AB5’s future implications on the gig economy for California residents and the services they previously took for granted