School of Law Faculty Publications

Anticipating the Societal Challenges of Nanotechnologies

Diana M. Bowman — Tue, 07 May 2013 06:21:21 PDT

This article frames a collection of writings comprising a special issue of the NanoEthics journal. The pieces are related through three themes: (i) the relationship between technoscientific developments and consensus making and breaking; (ii) the notion of technological regulation as an activity intimately entangled with the regulation of relations among a wide host of actors and stakeholders; and (iii) law’s omnipresence in and importance to effective regulation. The seven articles of the special issue are briefly contextualized against this thematic field.

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The end of men, again

Kara W. Swanson — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 11:13:43 PDT

The current attention to the “end of men” is occurring as men’s role as biological fathers is becoming radically deemphasized through assisted reproductive technologies and alternative family formation. As other historians have noted, since the nineteenth century, there have been serial crises of masculinity in the United States, in which the perceived loss of power by white middle-class heterosexual men has been decried. This essay, written for an on-line forum considering Hanna Rosin's The End of Men, analyzes the current crisis in the context of earlier explorations of the biological end of men, from early twentieth century feminist utopian fiction...

Access to syringes for HIV prevention for injection drug users in St. Petersburg, Russia: syringe purchase test study

Ekaterina V. Fedorova — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 06:18:06 PST

Background

The HIV epidemic in Russia is concentrated among injection drug users (IDUs). This is especially true for St. Petersburg where high HIV incidence persists among the city's estimated 80,000 IDUs. Although sterile syringes are legally available, access for IDUs may be hampered. To explore the feasibility of using pharmacies to expand syringe access and provide other prevention services to IDUs, we investigated the current access to sterile syringes at the pharmacies and the correlation between pharmacy density and HIV prevalence in St. Petersburg.

Methods

965 pharmacies citywide were mapped, classified by ownership type, and the association between pharmacy density...

Deterrence theory and the corporate criminal actor: Professor Utset's fresh take on an old problem

Daniel S. Medwed — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 08:40:44 PST

This essay comments on Professor Manuel Utset's latest work in the area of corporate criminal conduct and time-consistent preferences. The essay praises Professor Utset for developing a strong theoretical basis for justifying the external regulation of corporate actors, but also addresses another implication of his theory -- that it has salience in warranting greater internal regulation as well.

Assessing fairness in workers' compensation reform: a commentary on the 1995 West Virginia Workers' Compensation Legislation

Emily A. Spieler — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 08:18:44 PST

Injured workers, workers’ compensation, and work: new perspectives on the workers' compensation debate in West Virginia

Emily A. Spieler — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 08:13:08 PST

Can coal miners escape black lung? an analysis of the Coal Miner Job Transfer Program and its implications for occupational medical removal protection programs

Emily A. Spieler — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 08:04:12 PST

“At the hospital there are no human rights”: reproductive and sexual rights violations of women living with HIV in Namibia

Aziza Ahmed — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 07:13:15 PST

This report documents the ongoing stigma and discrimination of women living with HIV in Namibia, building on prior findings and investigations on the subject, such as the 2008 research conducted by the International Community of Women Living with HIV/AIDS (ICW) and the Namibian Women’s Health Network (NWHN). The report, based upon both desk research and a field mission, examines the human rights situation related to sexual and reproductive health of women living with HIV, including the gravity and ongoing nature of forced and coerced sterilizations in Namibia. The report also provides evidence of violations of informed consent in the context...

Book review: Cox, Bok & Gorman, Cases and Materials on Labor Law

Roger I. Abrams — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 07:22:32 PST

In this light-hearted book review – perhaps the only such work ever attempted in poetry – Professor Abrams borrows a famous verse written by John Keats to examine the new edition of the leading Labor Law casebook. The substantive review is contained in footnotes to his new poem “Upon First Looking into Cox, Bok and Gorman.”

Advancing human rights in patient care: the law in seven transitional countries

Leo Beletsky — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 09:05:56 PST

Introduction: framing economic, social, and cultural rights

Martha F. Davis — Sat, 26 Jan 2013 06:40:36 PST

This paper introduces a Symposium issue of the Northeastern University Law Journal devoted to Framing Economic, Social and Cultural Rights for Mobilization and Advocacy: Towards a Strategic Agenda in the United States. Papers in this Symposium issue include Redemptive and Rejectionist Frames: Framing Economic, Social and Cultural Rights for Advocacy and Mobilization in the United States, by Katherine G. Young; The 99% Solution: Human Rights and Economic Justice in the United States, by Dorothy Q. Thomas; Economic and Social Rights in the United States: Implementation Without Ratification, by Gillian MacNaughton and Mariah McGill; Framing Economic, Social and Cultural Rights at...

Policy reform to shift the health and human rights environment for vulnerable groups: the case of Kyrgyzstan's Instruction 417

Leo Beletsky — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 06:33:15 PST

Background: Police activities shape behavior and health outcomes among drug users, sex workers, and other vulnerable groups. Interventions to change the policing of drug consumption and sex work in ways that facilitate public health programming and respect for human rights have included policy reforms, education, and litigation. In 2009, the Kyrgyz government promulgated “Instruction 417,” prohibiting police interference with “harm reduction” programs, re-enforcing citizen rights, addressing police occupational safety concerns, and institutionalizing police-public health collaboration.

Objectives/Methods: Although ample evidence points to gaps between intended and actual impact of policy and other structural interventions, there is little research on the impact...

Global governance of health: conference report

Scott Burris — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 04:20:08 PST

“Governance” is the management of events in a social system. “Good governance” in global health requires institutions capable of effectively delivering health goods, and mechanisms of participation and accountability that maximize the extent to which stakeholders at all levels can shape both the ends and the means of health programs.

The OSI Seminar on the Global Governance of Health brought together 40 global thinkers and leaders in public health, health services delivery, health policy, and academia for two days of intensive discussion of the current state of health governance, followed by two days of collaborative brainstorming on new initiatives in...

Leaked TPP investment chapter presents a grave threat to access to medicines

Brook K. Baker — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 05:36:45 PST

The leaked Trans-Pacific Partnership Investment Chapter has been analyzed extensively with respect to its dangerous intellectual property protections and enhanced enforcement mechanisms and its equally dangerous extra-judicial investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provisions. In contrast, this analysis focuses on the particular risks of the Investment Chapter with respect to access to medicines because of the direct and indirect inclusion of IPRs in the Chapter’s coverage. These risks are cumulative because of other provisions in the proposed US IP chapter that would strengthen, broaden, and lengthen intellectual property rights with respect to pharmaceutical patent, data, and pricing provisions and that would expand...

A critical embracing of the digital lawyer

Michael Bennett — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 05:28:43 PST

This essay is a contribution to the Educating the Digital Lawyer book project and addresses methods by which the legal academy might critically embrace the digitalization of legal practice, and a necessarily concurrent set of modifications to standard forms of legal education. The analytical approach of the essay is derived from Science and Technology Studies (STS), and particularly emphasizes the way that interdisciplinary domain draws attention to the porousness of the borders between technoscientific domains and social domains — including that of law — and the various ways in which technical artifacts (i.e., communication and information technologies), in addition to...

Judicial deradicalization of the Wagner Act and the origins of modern legal consciousness, 1937-1941

Karl E. Klare — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 05:37:23 PDT

Labor law as ideology: toward a new historiography of collective bargaining law

Karl E. Klare — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 05:29:51 PDT

This article discusses a newly emerging historiography of post-New Deal United States collective bargaining law. Critical labor law will be depicted primarily by highlighting its main lines of attack on traditional learning. Most contributions to the literature of collective bargaining law are overwhelmingly doctrinal and rule-focused in emphasis. They are written, explicitly or implicitly, from the perspective of beliefs and values about the social function of collective bargaining drawn or inferred from the stated purposes, the legislative history of and judicial glosses upon the major federal labor statutes. This literature takes as given and unquestioned the desirability of maintaining the...

The law-school curriculum in the 1980s: what's left?

Karl E. Klare — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 05:18:29 PDT

When less is more: changes to the New York Court of Appeals' Civil Jurisdiction

Luke Bierman — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 04:57:37 PDT

This paper, an initial step of a larger project designed to provide a comprehensive consideration of the Court of Appeals, addresses some ramifications of the changes in the court's jurisdiction. Specifically, this paper will study characteristics of the court's decisions, such as rates of affirmance, unanimity and type of decision, i.e., opinion or memorandum. This examiniation will improve our understanding of the judicial decision-making process and enable us to view the Court of Appeals as an institution with a particular role in the prevailing legal and political structures and prcoesses.

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Horizontal pressures and vertical tensions: state constitutional discordancy at the New York Court of Appeals

Luke Bierman — Sat, 13 Oct 2012 11:55:55 PDT

This article is meant to accept Chief Judge Kaye's invitation to discuss the New York Court of Appeals' approach to its different cases. It will examine the extent to which the Court of Appeals acts consensually in its plenary caseload and in its effort to resolve particular issues arising under the New York Constitution. Judge Kaye's perception that the Court of Appeals exercises its decision making prerogatives differently in several categories of cases will be explored so that some preliminary assessments about the phenomenon can be made.

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