A few days ago, the New York Times ran an op-ed about the pervasive problems Pakistanis face accessing drinking water. Tap water is available in many places in Pakistan, but drinking it is a health risk; according to one recent report, forty percent of all deaths in Pakistan result from infectious diseases contracted by drinking… Continue reading Jessica Vapnek on Packaged-Water Regulation
When Franklin Zimring decided to study lethal violence by police for his recent book When Police Kill, he learned that official records could not be trusted. As he explains in the book, data collected by the FBI (or by Vital Statistics) accounts for no more than half of the shootings reliably counted by The Guardian or The Washington Post.… Continue reading Aaron Rappaport on Police-Stop Violence
What duty do healthcare employers have to accommodate employees with religious objections to influenza vaccines? My colleagues Dorit Reiss and Veena Dubal, recognized experts (respectively) in vaccine law and employment discrimination, have teamed up to provide an invaluable primer on the law governing this question. Their bottom-line answer is, “not much.” Professor Reiss and Professor… Continue reading Dorit Reiss and Veena Dubal on Religious Accommodations for Vaccine Mandates in Employment
My colleague Professor Zachary Price, an expert on the constitutional separation of powers, recently dove into the First Amendment debates in a symposium article published in the University of Pennsylvania’s Journal of Constitutional Law. The article, titled “Our Imperiled Absolutist First Amendment,” examines the First Amendment in light of three salient socio-political developments: fake news,… Continue reading Zach Price on the First Amendment in Imperiled Times
In 2005, popular disgust with several high-profile cases of bankrupt firms paying top executives large “retention” bonuses led Congress to prohibit such bonuses for firms in Chapter 11. In a forthcoming article in the Southern California Law Review, Regulating Bankruptcy Bonuses, Professor Jared Ellias suggests that firms have found ways to evade this prohibition, so… Continue reading Jared Ellias on Regulating Bankruptcy Bonuses
Who matters in the tax-policy debate? My colleague, Leo Martinez, in his recent article Latinos and the Internal Revenue Code: A Tax Policy Primer for the New Administration, 20 Harv. Latinx L. Rev. 101 (2017), argues that legislators and policymakers should pay more attention to Latinos and how they are adversely affected by the tax law. To… Continue reading Leo Martinez on Latinos and the Internal Revenue Code
A decade of reform efforts has given financial regulators an array of tools to stave off the next crisis—living wills, orderly liquidation authority, and so on. These new tools, in turn, have produced a large and lively literature in legal and economic scholarship. Yet a fundamental question—exactly when regulators should deploy the new regulatory apparatus—has… Continue reading John Crawford on the Timing of Financial Regulation
The past few decades have witnessed an explosion in the size of the largest US law firms, and a widely accepted narrative holds that this has had a negative effect on the well-being and professional satisfaction of lawyers practicing at these firms. In an important exploratory study and new paper, When Does Big Law Work?,… Continue reading Abe Cable on When Big Law Works
Must the federal government turn over federal public lands to the states? Several years ago, the Utah Legislature appropriated several hundred thousand dollars to study this very question. Not surprisingly, since the study was written by attorneys who hoped to litigate these same claims, the answer was “yes.” This was not exactly a new position.… Continue reading John Leshy on the Constitutionality of Public Lands
Soaring healthcare prices currently threaten the viability of our healthcare system and the overall economy. U.S. healthcare spending, both per capita and as a percentage of GDP, far outpaces spending by any other high-income country, without corresponding increases in quality or access to care. Pharmaceutical drug prices, a component of overall healthcare spending, have dramatically… Continue reading Robin Feldman on Drug Manufacturers’ Abuse of the Citizen-Petition Process