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Thirty-Five Years of Inaction: The Unfulfilled Promise of the Medicaid Equal Access Provision
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Establishing a Duty to Not Destroy : Using Fiduciary Duty to Hold Settler-Colonial States Responsible for Cultural and Linguistic Harms Committed Against Indigenous Students at Government-Run Boarding Schools
Get PDFThe Power of Subnational Actors in Enforcement of the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution
Get PDFThe Geneva Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (CLRTAP) was adopted in 1979 and continues to serve as the preeminent international framework for transboundary air pollution. The international community has used a range of multilateral and bilateral cooperative arrangements to address international movement of harmful pollutants. Each has had to contend with the issue of ensuring compliance among party States. CLRTAP faces challenges in addressing transboundary pollution in non-Western countries despite clear evidence that air pollution is harmful to human health and technological developments that enable more accurate tracking of pollutants. In the absence of a model assigning liability for transboundary air pollution to States, the involvement of subnational actors in the enforcement of CLRTAP is crucial. Subnational actors—regions, states (as opposed to nation-states), provinces, cities, and nongovernmental entities—have been a leading influence in environmental protection and climate change action. Literature addressing the use of subnational actors has been broadly applied to climate change issues. The related field of transboundary air pollution could benefit from a similar examination of the importance of subnational actors in enforcement mechanisms. This note seeks to understand the role of subnational actors within the implementation of the 1979 Geneva Convention on Long Range Transboundary Air Pollution and suggests a cooperative approach wherein the significance of subnational actors is recognized and they are utilized to encourage compliance with CLRTAP and the globalization of its goals. Part I briefly outlines the history of CLRTAP and the effect of subsequent updates to the framework. Part II addresses the problem of ensuring enforcement with international legal treaties without the participation of subnational actors and analyzes deficiencies within the current CLRTAP liability framework, particularly the lack of compliance and implementation within Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia (EECCA countries). This analysis draws on existing models of compliance for participation of States in international legal frameworks. Part II also advocates for the expansion of the role of subnational actors in the implementation of transboundary pollution agreements through increased public access to information as well as engagement between international, national, and sub-national actors. This paper concludes that robust participation of subnational actors in CLRTAP is crucial for encouraging implementation of and compliance with the convention in EECCA countries
Narrowing the Frame: Consumer Insurance Policies and the Limits of the Restatement of Consumer Contracts
No full textObamacare for Homeowners Insurance: Fixing America\u27s Broken Insurance Markets in a Time of Climate Change
No full textOver the last decade, homeowners insurance markets nationwide have experienced unprecedented instability due to climate change. These disruptions, which are likely to accelerate in the coming years, risk destabilizing real estate markets, triggering financial instability, and undermining the nation’s resilience to climate change. Despite these massive stakes, federal and state reforms to date have largely failed to result in more accessible and affordable homeowners insurance coverage that promotes climate change resilience. This Article offers a new way forward, arguing that today’s troubled homeowners insurance markets resemble the broken, state health insurance markets that pre-dated the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare. For that reason, Obamacare offers a compelling initial template for reforming homeowners insurance markets in a time of climate change. This template begins with the principle that the federal government should play a major role in regulating homeowners insurance markets due to their national importance. However, rather than completely displacing existing state insurance regulation, federal reform should embrace a cooperative federalism model patterned on the ACA. This model would rely on federal law to establish key rules for selling, underwriting, pricing, and subsidizing homeowners insurance, while allowing states to implement and customize these rules to their local markets. Substantively, it would require homeowners insurers to offer coverage that meets comprehensive federal minimum standards and to avoid discrimination that does not plausibly promote social goals like climate change resilience. At the same time, Obamacare-based reform to homeowners insurance markets would dispense with heavy-handed state regulation of insurers’ rates, instead relying on managed competition among private insurers via state-run insurance exchanges. It would also rely on progressive subsidies to ensure that coverage remained affordable for low-income purchasers. While these reforms would, of course, need to be adapted to the homeowners insurance setting, Obamacare ultimately offers a powerful and underappreciated model for ensuring that homeowners insurance markets equitably promote climate change resilience in the decades to come
Fairness in Contract Law: An Impossibility Theorem?
No full textScholars have long debated whether contract law should prioritize maximizing efficiency and social welfare or, instead, prioritize justice, fairness and other deontological values. The debate is partly prescriptive (what should we try to do with contract law rules) and partly conceptual (how should we understand contract law). This article surveys central positions in this debate, distinguishing between the corrective and redistributive functions of contract law and between doing justice between the parties and more systemic effects. It highlights an impossibility theorem that underscores the self-defeating nature of redistributive policies in price-based contractual relationships, using a numerical example and two policy interventions to illustrate the inherent trade-offs