New Paper: The Civil Rights of Health: A New Approach to Challenging Structural Inequality

New Paper: Harris, Angela P. and Pamukcu, Aysha, The Civil Rights of Health: A New Approach to Challenging Structural Inequality (March 11, 2019). UCLA Law Review, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3350597

Abstract below:

An emerging literature on “the social determinants of health” reveals that a major driver of public health disparities is subordination. This body of research makes possible a powerful new alliance between public health and civil rights advocates: an initiative to promote the “civil rights of health.” Understanding health as a matter of justice and civil rights law as a health intervention has the potential to strengthen public health advocacy. At the same time, understanding social injustice as a health issue as well as a moral issue has the potential to reinvigorate civil rights advocacy. This Article argues that a “civil rights of health” initiative, built on a “health justice” framework, can help educate policymakers and the public about the health effects of subordination, create new legal tools for challenging subordination, and ultimately reduce or eliminate unjust health disparities.

News Coverage: Underground Lives: The Sunless World of Immigrants in Queens

News Coverage: Nikita Stewart, Ryan Christopher Jones, Sergio Peçanha, Jeffrey Furticella, and Josh Williams, Underground Lives: The Sunless World of Immigrants in Queens, NYTimes.com, October 23, 2019.

New Book: The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay

New Book: Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay (W. W. Norton & Company, 2019). Overview below:

America’s runaway inequality has an engine: our unjust tax system.

Even as they became fabulously wealthy, the ultra-rich have had their taxes collapse to levels last seen in the 1920s. Meanwhile, working-class Americans have been asked to pay more. The Triumph of Injustice presents a forensic investigation into this dramatic transformation, written by two economists who revolutionized the study of inequality. Eschewing anecdotes and case studies, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman offer a comprehensive view of America’s tax system, based on new statistics covering all taxes paid at all levels of government. Their conclusion? For the first time in more than a century, billionaires now pay lower tax rates than their secretaries.

Blending history and cutting-edge economic analysis, and writing in lively and jargon-free prose, Saez and Zucman dissect the deliberate choices (and sins of indecision) that have brought us to today: the gradual exemption of capital owners; the surge of a new tax avoidance industry, and the spiral of tax competition among nations. With clarity and concision, they explain how America turned away from the most progressive tax system in history to embrace policies that only serve to compound the wealth of a few.

But The Triumph of Injustice is much more than a laser-sharp analysis of one of the great political and intellectual failures of our time. Saez and Zucman propose a visionary, democratic, and practical reinvention of taxes, outlining reforms that can allow tax justice to triumph in today’s globalized world and democracy to prevail over concentrated wealth.

A pioneering companion website allows anyone to evaluate proposals made by the authors, and to develop their own alternative tax reform at taxjusticenow.org.

News Coverage: Why Don’t Rich People Just Stop Working?

News Coverage: Alex Williams, Why Don’t Rich People Just Stop Working?, NYTimes.com, October 17, 2019. Are the wealthy addicted to money, competition, or just feeling important? Yes.

News Coverage: $350,000 a Year, and Just Getting By

News Coverage: Annie Lowrey, $350,000 a Year, and Just Getting By, The Atlantic, October 21, 2019. Financial confessionals reveal that income inequality and geographic inequality have normalized absurd spending patterns.

 

 

New Op-Ed: There are other ways

New Op-Ed: Dennis A. Rendleman, There are other ways, American Bar Association, October 2019.

New Book: Getting By: Economic Rights and Legal Protections for People with Low Income

New Book: Helen Hershkoff & Stephen Loffredo, Getting By: Economic Rights and Legal Protections for People with Low Income (Oxford University Press 2020). Overview below:

Getting By offers an integrated, critical account of the federal laws and programs that most directly affect poor and low-income people in the United States-the unemployed, the underemployed, and the low-wage employed, whether working in or outside the home.

The central aim is to provide a resource for individuals and groups trying to access benefits, secure rights and protections, and mobilize for economic justice.

The topics covered include cash assistance, employment and labor rights, food assistance, health care, education, consumer and banking law, housing assistance, rights in public places, access to justice, and voting rights.

This comprehensive volume is appropriate for law school and undergraduate courses, and is a vital resource for policy makers, journalists, and others interested in social welfare policy in the United States.

News Coverage: When Medical Debt Collectors Decide Who Gets Arrested

News Coverage: Lizzie Presser, When Medical Debt Collectors Decide Who Gets Arrested, propublica.org, October 16, 2019. Welcome to Coffeyville, Kansas, where the judge has no law degree, debt collectors get a cut of the bail, and Americans are watching their lives — and liberty — disappear in the pursuit of medical debt collection.

New Article: Conceptualizing Legal Childhood in the Twenty-First Century

New Article: Elizabeth S. Scott &  Clare Huntington, Conceptualizing Legal Childhood in the Twenty-First Century, Michigan Law Review, forthcoming; Columbia Public Law Research Paper No. 14-633 (2019). Abstract below:

The law governing children is complex, sometimes appearing almost incoherent. The relatively simple framework established in the Progressive era, in which parents had primary authority over children, subject to limited state oversight, has broken down over the past few decades. Lawmakers started granting children some adult rights and privileges, raising questions about their traditional status as vulnerable, dependent, and legally incompetent beings. As children emerged as legal persons, children’s rights advocates challenged the rationale for parental authority, contending that robust parental rights often harm children. And a wave of punitive reforms in response to juvenile crime in the 1990s undermined the state’s longstanding role as the protector of children.

We address this seeming incoherence by identifying a deep structure and logic in the regulation of children that is becoming clear in the twenty-first century. In our conceptual framework, the law’s central goal, across multiple legal domains, is to promote child wellbeing. This unifying purpose has roots in the Progressive era, but three distinct characteristics distinguish the modern approach. Today, lawmakers advance child wellbeing with greater confidence and success by drawing on a wide body of research on child and adolescent development and the efficacy of related policies. This is bolstered by the clear understanding that promoting child wellbeing generally furthers social welfare, leading to a broader base of support for state policies and legal doctrines. Finally, there is a growing recognition that the regulation of children and families has long been tainted by racial and class bias and that a new commitment to minimizing these pernicious influences is essential to both the legitimacy and fairness of the regime. In combination, these features make the contemporary regulatory framework superior to earlier approaches.

Rather than pitting the state, parents, and child in competition for control over children’s lives – the conception of family regulation since the 1960s – our Child Wellbeing framework offers a surprisingly integrated regulatory approach. Properly understood, parental rights and children’s rights, as well as the direct role of the state in children’s lives, are increasingly defined and unified by a research driven, social-welfare-regarding effort to promote child wellbeing. This normatively attractive conceptualization of legal childhood does not define every area of legal regulation, but it is a strong throughline and should be elevated and embraced more broadly. In short, our framework brings coherence to the complex legal developments of the past half century and provides guidance moving forward for this critical area of the law.

Call For Papers 2020 Law and Development Conference: “Law and Development in High Income Countries”

Call For Papers
2020 Law and Development Conference: “Law and Development in High Income Countries”

06 Nov 2020, Bucerius Law School, Hamburg, Germany

The Law and Development Institute (http://www.lawanddevelopment.net) and Bucerius Law School will co-host the 2020 Law and Development Conference in Hamburg, Germany.

Economic development is the term that has been associated with less developed countries in the Third World (“developing countries”), not the economically advanced countries (“developed countries”). However, development problems in high income countries are not less important. Changing economic conditions in recent decades caused stagnating wages and widening economic gaps among individual citizens and regions within developed countries. Stagnant economic growth deepening economic polarization and institutional incapacity to deal with these issues can be observed in several rich countries. Private law, public law, and institutions in general play a crucial role in addressing these problems. The conference addresses law and development issues relevant to high income countries on the following sub-topics.

– Poverty and Inequality in High Income Countries and the Role of Law
– Legal and Institutional Frameworks for Growth and Stability in High Income Countries
– The Role of State and Development in Industrialized Countries
– International Trade, WTO and Substitute Institutions

We ask all interested speakers to submit one-page paper abstracts by January 31, 2020. (Please indicate the relevant sub-topic in your submission.) We expect abstracts, papers, and presentations in English language.

IMPORTANT DEADLINES:
Abstract Submission: January 31, 2020
Notification of Acceptance: February 28, 2020
Final Selection of Speakers: March 15, 2020
Full Papers Due: September 15, 2020

Please note that all conference papers will be uploaded on the conference website and will be accessible by the general public (with the attachment of appropriate copyright notice).

Selected papers will be published in Law and Development Review Special Issue in 2021.

All speakers and participants are expected to make their own travel arrangements during the conference.

PAPER SUBMISSIONS/FURTHER INFORMATION: Please submit your abstract and conference inquiries to Law and Development Institute (Professor Y.S. Lee) by email at info@lawanddevelopment.net