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Vaccine Hesitancy Across Time: Legal and Policy Interventions from the Dawn of the Anti-Vaccination Movement to the Era of Social Media
Get PDFMental Health and Social Media: Analyzing the Shift in Future Liability for Social Media Platforms
Get PDFQualified Sovereignty
Get PDFSometimes acts of the federal government cause harm; sometimes acts of contractors hired by the federal government cause harm. In cases involving the latter, federal contractors often invoke the sovereign’s constitutionally granted and doctrinally expanded supremacy to restrict avenues for the injured to recover even from private actors. In prior work, we analyzed how federal contractors exploit three “sovereign shield” defenses—preemption, derivative sovereign immunity, and derivative intergovernmental immunity—to evade liability, accountability, and oversight.
This Article considers whether, when, and how private federal contractors should be held accountable in a court of law. We argue that a contractor should be required to qualify before it can derive the immunity enjoyed by its sovereign partner. This Article proposes that a private contractor be entitled to such “qualified sovereignty” contingent on satisfying three conditions: (1) it was acting as the government’s agent, (2) it complied with any guidelines established by the government, and (3) it was reasonable for the contractor to believe that its conduct would not violate rights protected by law. Adopting scaffolding from two embattled doctrinal constructs—derivative sovereign immunity and qualified immunity—qualified sovereignty balances the rights of victims to recover for harms with protection for private entities from unforeseen liability incurred at the government’s explicit and lawful direction
Defunding Police Agencies
Get PDFThis Article contextualizes the police defunding movement and the backlash it has generated. The defunding movement emerged from the work of Black-led activists to reassert democratic control over policing and shift resources to social service agencies and other institutions serving community needs. In reaction, states have enacted anti-defunding bills checking local government reduction of law enforcement budgets. These anti-defunding measures continue a long tradition of state and federal control over local police spending, subverting local democratic control over police agencies. These limits include direct legal constraints on local police spending and indirect constraints through grants and authorization to collect fines, fees, and forfeitures. These mechanisms form a ratchet, bribing local governments to increase police spending and then mandating them to maintain it, at the eventual cost of cutting social services. This leaves cities little choice but to try to police their way out of the problems of poverty and inequality. Thus, constraints on local police funding help explain the decades-long shift of resources from social welfare to law enforcement. The problem revealed by the defunding controversy is not just the size of police budgets but also the perverse process determining those budgets. Before police agencies can be right-sized or reformed, police budgeting must be put in the hands of the people policed
Beef -- It\u27s \u3cem\u3eNot\u3c/em\u3e What\u27s for Dinner : The Implications of France\u27s Newest Law for the Future of Labeling Cultured Meat in the European Union
Get PDFConflict in the Caucasus -- Analysis of Nagorno-Karabakh\u27s Right to Sucession Under National and International Law
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