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People with Disabilities
Elizabeth Pendo
Given the national reckoning around structural inequity, racism, and intractable health inequalities, there is an unrequited demand among faculty and scholars who teach and write about health equity and social justice for texts that go beyond a discussion of the social determinants of health and access to care to provide analysis that offers a structural and legal lens for understanding entrenched health inequity in the U.S. The COVID-19 pandemic has only made the need for this approach more compelling and urgent.
Addressing that need, authors Elizabeth Tobin-Tyler and Joel Teitelbaum have built upon and expanded their first edition with Essentials of Health Justice: Law, Policy, and Structural Change, Second Edition. This unparalleled new edition explores the historical, structural, and legal underpinnings of racial, ethnic, gender-based, and ableist inequities in health, and provides a framework for students to consider how and why health inequity is tied to the ways that laws are structured and enforced. Additionally, it offers analysis of potential solutions and posits how law may be used as a tool to remedy health injustice.
Written for a wide, interdisciplinary audience of students and scholars in public health, medicine, and law, as well as other health professions, this accessible text discusses both the systems and policies that influence health and explores opportunities to advocate for legal and policy change by public health practitioners and policymakers, physicians, health care professionals, lawyers, and lay people.
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A House Divided: The Minnesota Experimental City and Competing Narratives of Conservation
Todd A. Wildermuth
Minnesota’s Twin Cities have long been powerful engines of change. From their origins in the early nineteenth century, the Twin Cities helped drive the dispossession of the region’s Native American peoples, turned their riverfronts into bustling industrial and commercial centers, spread streets and homes outward to the horizon, and reached well beyond their urban confines, setting in motion the environmental transformation of distant hinterlands. As these processes unfolded, residents inscribed their culture into the landscape, complete with all its tensions, disagreements, contradictions, prejudices, and social inequalities. These stories lie at the heart of Nature’s Crossroads. The book features an interdisciplinary team of distinguished scholars who aim to open new conversations about the environmental history of the Twin Cities and Greater Minnesota.
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Privacy, Public Disclosure, and Police-Worn Body Camera Footage
Mary D. Fan
Police body-worn cameras (BWCs) are at the cutting edge of policing. They have sparked important conversations about the proper role and extent of police in society and about balancing security, oversight, accountability, privacy, and surveillance in our modern world. Police on Camera address the conceptual and empirical evidence surrounding the use of BWCs by police officers in societies around the globe, offering a variety of differing opinions from experts in the field.
The book provides the reader with conceptual and empirical analyses of the role and impact of police body-worn cameras in society. These analyses are complimented by invited commentaries designed to open up dialogue and generate debate on these important social issues. The book offers informed, critical commentary to the ongoing debates about the implications that BWCs have for society in various parts of the world, with special attention to issues of police accountability and discretion, privacy, and surveillance.
This book is designed to be accessible to a broad audience, and is targeted at scholars and students of surveillance, law and policy, and the police, as well as policymakers and others interested in how surveillance technologies are impacting our modern world and criminal justice institutions.
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United States v. Nwoye (judgment)
Mary D. Fan
The case represents one of the few instances where an appellate court considered whether an affirmative defense of duress should be allowed to incorporate evidence of battered person syndrome. The defendant, convicted of conspiring with her boyfriend to extort money from a doctor, testified that her boyfriend coerced her participation through his physically and emotionally abusive behavior. He also pretended to be an FBI agent which allowed the defendant to argue she did not feel reasonably safe in reporting the extortion scheme. Also of note, the case had an unusual procedure history wherein a three-judge panel reversed its prior judgment and the final split opinion was authored by Judge (now Justice) Brett Kavanaugh.
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Islam and Constitutional Law: Insights for the Emerging Field of Buddhist Constitutional Law
Clark B. Lombardi
This chapter connects the study of Islam and constitutional law with the nascent material on Buddhism. First, it notes the surprisingly long delay in commencing a study of the relationship between Islam and constitutional law, and upon the political and academic developments that eventually inspired the academy to focus its energies productively onto studies in this area. Second, it discusses some of the central findings produced by scholars of this field over the past twenty-five years, focusing on the Sunni world. Third, this chapter will very cautiously draw upon the contributions in this volume to highlight some ways in which patterns found in the Sunni Muslim world seem to be absent in a number of Buddhist countries. The overlaps and contrasts between these two religious traditions and their approaches to constitutional law provide many opportunities for deeper engagement.
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Constitution-Making for Divided Societies: Afghanistan
Clark B. Lombardi and Pasarlay Shamshad
This chapter begins by surveying the current literature on constitutional design constitutions for divided societies and constitutional approaches to power sharing. It pays particular attention to the view that constitutions are best understood not as contracts, but rather as coordination devices. An implication of this view for constitutional design is that, in deeply divided societies, successful coordination (and thus successful constitution-writing) may be easier to achieve if the constitution deliberately leaves certain divisive constitutional questions unresolved, with the understanding that those questions will be resolved incrementally over time. Against this theoretical background, the chapter uses the history and constitutional history of Afghanistan to illuminate the challenges of developing a constitution that can coordinate politics in a deeply divided society, and it evaluates the pros and cons of different approaches to constitutional design in such contexts.
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Starting at the Start: Integrating Race and Reflection for an Antiracist Approach to Professional Identity Development in the First-Year Curriculum
Monte Mills, Eduardo R.C. Capulong, and Andrew King-Ries
Drawing upon the experience of faculty from across the country, Integrating Doctrine and Diversity is a collection of essays with practical advice, written by faculty for faculty, on specific ways to integrate diversity, equity and inclusion into the law school curriculum. Chapters will focus on subjects traditionally taught in the first-year curriculum (Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law, Contracts, Legal Writing, Legal Research, Property, Torts) and each chapter will also include a short annotated bibliography curated by a law librarian. With submissions from over 40 scholars, the collection is the first of its kind to offer reflections, advice, and specific instruction on how to integrate issues of diversity and inclusions into first-year doctrinal courses.
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COVID-19 Employee Health Checks, Remote Work, and Disability Law
Elizabeth Pendo
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities, about 61 million individuals in the U.S. (Okoro et al. 2018). The law’s protections in the workplace are especially important during COVID-19, which has worsened pre-existing disparities experienced by people with disabilities (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2020b; Brucker et al. 2015). The ADA also applies to new strategies to reduce the risk of COVID-19 infection in the workplace. This Chapter will focus on two strategies that impact individuals with and without disabilities – employee health screening, testing and vaccination policies, and new or expanded remote work programs.
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Protecting the Rights and Wellbeing of People with Disabilities during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Elizabeth Pendo
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed and exacerbated significant inequities experienced by people with disabilities. It has also emphasized the value of legal protections against discrimination based on disability. The Americans with Disabilities Act was enacted 30 years ago to eliminate discrimination against people with disabilities and ensure equal opportunity across major areas of American life (ADA, 2008). Together with an earlier law, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (Rehabilitation Act, 2012), this landmark civil rights law impacts a broad range of issues raised by the COVID-19 pandemic and protects a large and growing number of Americans. This Chapter focuses on application of these laws to health care and employment during the pandemic. These laws are powerful tools to protect the rights and well-being of people with disabilities, but they require robust enforcement. Enforcing agencies have provided COVID-19- specific guidance on the application of the laws to health care and employment. Further action is needed, as unresolved legal questions, gaps in protections, lack of knowledge of and noncompliance with disability rights laws, and a lack of data limit the impact of these laws. Recommendations for policymakers to ensure COVID-19 responses respects the rights and wellbeing of people with disabilities include: robust enforcement of the laws; clear and current agency guidance on how to comply with the laws; education about the requirements of the laws, especially in health care settings; and improved data collection and reporting.
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Protecting the Rights of People with Disabilities
Elizabeth Pendo
One in four Americans — a diverse group of 61 million people — experience some form of disability (Okoro, 2018). On average, people with disabilities experience significant disparities in education, employment, poverty, access to health care, food security, housing, transportation, and exposure to crime and domestic violence (Pendo & Iezzoni, 2019). Intersections with demographic characteristics such as race, ethnicity, gender, and LGBT status, may intensify certain inequities. For example, women with disability experience greater disparities in income, education, and employment (Nosek, 2016), and members of underserved racial and ethnic groups with disabilities experience greater disparities in health status and access to health care (Yee, et. al, 2016). These longstanding inequities are compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic and by governmental and private responses that discriminate on the basis of disability. Legal protections of people with disabilities are governed by two key federal laws: the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act (“Section 504” or “Rehabilitation Act”). Together, these laws ensure that people with disabilities have equal opportunities in employment, in state and local services and programs, and to goods and services. The broad reach of these laws impact a host of issues raised by the COVID-19 pandemic. Enforcing agencies have provided COVID-19-specific guidance on the application of the laws in health care and in employment. However, gaps in protections as well as widespread lack of knowledge of and noncompliance with the ADA and the Rehabilitation Act limit their impact. Recommendations include: continued enforcement of the laws; clear and current agency guidance on how to comply with the laws; education about the requirements of the laws, especially in health care settings; and improved data collection and reporting.
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Climate Migration
Lauren E. Sancken and Maxine Burkett
Climate change disproportionately impacts vulnerable communities. For some of the most vulnerable, these impacts have and will continue to force them to move within and across borders, challenging international law to provide a coordinated and just means for migration. This chapter explores the phenomenon of ‘climate-induced migration,’ identifies the sociological and legal uncertainties that surround it, and suggests areas of further research to respond appropriately to the emerging crisis.
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The Promise of Global Digital Trade Facilitation Platforms
Jane K. Winn
With efforts for further substantive liberalization of trade showing little signs of success, focus has shifted to the rationalization and simplification of procedural regulations in international trade. The Agreement on the Trade Facilitation in Goods came into force in 2017, and proposals for similar agreements for trade in services and foreign investment have been submitted and are under discussion. This book discusses both existing and proposed provisions on trade facilitation within the World Trade Organisation (WTO). It covers relevant General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) provisions and jurisprudence, the negotiating history of the Trade Facilitation Agreement in Goods, provisions of the WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement and their relevance for developing countries’ concerns, with special emphasis on India, and the prospects for a global digital trade facilitation platform. The book also discusses the desirability for trade facilitation agreements for services and investment and the possibility of success of the proposals submitted in this regard in the WTO.
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Rights of Incarcerated Parents
Angélica Cházaro
This chapter discusses the childcare and custody rights of incarcerated parents. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, an estimated 809,800 state and federal prisoners were parents to children under the age of eighteen in 2007. There are approximately 1,706,600 children under the age of eighteen who have a parent in prison.
As a parent in prison, you may fear that your child will not be cared for, that you will lose your child, or that your relationship with your child will suffer while you are incarcerated. This Chapter focuses on New York state law and describes how the law provides parents in prison with various tools to prevent these things from happening.
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Hidden from View: Disability, Segregation and Work
Elizabeth Pendo
A central goal of the disability rights movement is to enable people with disabilities to fully participate in society and to live complete, independent, and engaged lives. Employment is considered central to this vision and has long been intertwined with ideas of equality and citizenship in the disability rights movement. However, too often people with disabilities are unseen, unwelcome, or simply not present in the traditional workplace.
The employment provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (42 U.S.C. § 12101) (ADA) were intended to bring working-age people with disabilities into the workplace by providing options for them to seek and gain meaningful, integrated employment. Although the ADA has made significant gains, the rate of progress in employment has been disappointing. For example, in 2012, only 32.7 percent of working-age adults with disabilities were employed, as compared with 73.6 percent of working-age adults without disabilities who were (Institute on Disability 2013). While the lack of progress of people with disabilities in the traditional workplace has received attention, the work done by many, especially those with severe disabilities in segregated workplaces, remains hidden in sheltered workshops.
Sheltered workshops are commonly defined as supervised, segregated workplaces for disabled adults and primarily for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. According to a 2001 report by the U.S. General Accounting Office, more than 400,000 people with disabilities are working in sheltered workshops across the country (GAO 2001). The work activities in sheltered workshops typically consist of simple assembly processes performed by hand. Examples include assembling small parts, hand-packaging items, packing or unpacking items, folding, sorting, and collating (pp. 10–12). Sheltered workshops are relatively small settings, each employing an average of eighty-six workers with disabilities, and primarily populated by people with disabilities (p. 10). Sheltered workshops may also include support services such as close supervision, job coaching, and life skills training (p. 13). Sheltered workshops are often characterized as job training programs, but many of them function as long-term and isolating alternatives to competitive employment. Although the invisibility of people with disabilities because of these sheltered workshops may appear to be a dramatic example, it shares similarities with other ways in which such individuals are unseen or simply not present in the traditional workplace. Indeed, there are several gaps or areas of conflict in ADA implementation that operate to obscure, exclude, or divert workers with disabilities from the traditional workplace.
This chapter explores the intersection of the concepts of disability, invisibility, and work and identifies the ways in which different and conflicting social and legal constructions of disability perpetuate the segregation and invisibility of people with disabilities in the workplace.
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Cross-Boarder Teaching and Collaboration
Kimberly D. Ambrose, William H.D. Fernholz, Catherine F. Klein, Dana Raigrodski, Stephen A. Rosenbaum, and Leah Wortham
Since the publication of Best Practices for Legal Education, the globalization of both legal education and law practice has exploded. Today’s lawyers increasingly serve border-crossing clients or clients who present with transnational legal issues. As law schools expand their international programs, and enroll increasing numbers of non-U.S. law students, law students transcend cultural and legal borders. As a result, they deepen their understanding of—and sharpen their critical perspective on—their own national systems. Similarly, U.S. law teachers are increasingly called to engage in border-crossing teaching and other academic pursuits. Best Practices did not address these issues. The primary aim of this chapter of Building on Best Practices: Transforming Legal Education in a Changing World (Lexis 2015) is to identify best practices for law teachers engaged with non-U.S. or “international” learners who study or train in a U.S.-style learning environment, either in the United States or abroad.
This chapter also addresses collaboration of U.S. law teachers with their counterparts abroad in such areas as developing innovative teaching and clinical legal education, training and research. It identifies eight guiding principles that cut across types of international learning and then applies these principles to three specific contexts: 1) teaching international students in U.S. law school settings; 2) integrating international students in U.S.-based clinics; and 3) collaborating in legal education and reform efforts with law teachers abroad.
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A Conscious Institutional Strategy for Expanding Experiential Education
Lisa Radtke Bliss and Deborah Maranville
As law schools seek to better prepare students for the profession, they are expanding experiential education in traditional contexts such as theory and practice simulation skills courses, clinics, and externships. At the same time, they are also searching for opportunities to expose students to practical learning opportunities during the entire course of their legal education by incorporating experiential education throughout the curriculum. It is a best practice to develop conscious strategies for pursuing this effort. While Best Practices for Legal Education called for the integration of teaching theory, doctrine, and practice, it did not address strategies for integrating experiential education across the curriculum.
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Robot-Sized Gaps in Surveillance Law
Ryan Calo
The past several years have seen a renewed interest in robotics, including by lawmakers. More than a dozen states have one or more robot-specific laws on the books. One of the issues lawmakers are concerned about is privacy. Thus, several states now limit how public or private entities may use drones for surveillance.
That robotics would raise privacy concerns is hardly surprising: robots implicate privacy practically by definition. Robots differ from previous and constituent technologies such as laptops precisely in that they proactively explore the physical world. But, owing to the inability of lawmakers and courts to think more broadly about robotics as a technology, emerging law creates or fails to close certain gaps in privacy law.
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Business and Financial Literacy
Dwight Drake
Law practice continues to become more complex and demand a broader range of specialized knowledge. Business and financial literacy skills, once viewed as only important in business school or for law students who intend to become lawyers representing business owners or entities, are being viewed differently by legal educators who desire to ensure that law students are prepared for practice.
The world is driven by business, and core business and financial issues routinely surface in various types of legal disputes, transactions, and planning challenges. At a minimum, knowledge of basic business and financial concepts will help a lawyer deal with personal consumer, credit, financial, investment, and business challenges and enhance the lawyer’s ability to serve others, even when retained for a non-business matter.
The importance of understanding core business and financial concepts is heightened for the lawyer who wants to serve business owners or executives at any level. Best Practices for Legal Education did not address the need for business and financial literacy. Given the growing recognition of this as a potential area for curricular development, it is a best practice for schools to identify whether students have opportunities in the curriculum to learn the knowledge, skills, and values of this subject.
This section explores why such knowledge, skills, and values are important and aims to identify the core elements of business and financial literacy for educators exploring this topic.
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Ensuring Effective Education in Alternative Clinical Models
Deborah Maranville
Best Practices for Legal Education organized its discussion of experiential courses around the “simulation-based courses, in-house clinics, and externships” typology without specifically defining what structures fall within each category or discussing the variations. The discussion of in-house clinics focused on fundamental principles for effective teaching and supervision and the need for appropriate facilities and office support. It only implicitly addressed the range of issues presented by alternative structures for clinics and did not address alternative externship structures or variations that combine features of both.
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Transfer of Learning
Deborah Maranville
A key characteristic of effective education is that students are able to retain and build on the information, skills, and values they learn in their work in later courses and in the world. Doing so is known as transfer of learning. Ultimately, for law students that means they are able to transfer what they learn into the work they do as professionals. Best Practices for Legal Education did not delve deeply into the educational literature on transfer of learning.
Underlying its preparation for practice theme, however, was an implicit recognition that both individual law teachers and law schools as institutions must educate students in a manner that facilitates transfer. Law teachers know all too well the challenges of achieving transfer: students often deny having encountered a legal doctrine that was unquestionably covered in another class. While this phenomenon raises other important questions, such as to what extent and for how long do students retain information conveyed in the classroom, it also potentially raises the question of transfer of learning. Even if students remember the information in its initial context, can they draw on it in a new one?
Transfer is a core issue for effective teaching and learning, especially in the context of professional education where students are expected to be able to use their skills–even if the skills in question are solely the analytical ones supposedly taught in the conventional law school classroom–when they encounter new problems. Yet, until recently, how to create conditions that will lead to transfer has been a neglected question in legal education.
Transfer of learning is critical if law schools intend to educate skilled professionals, but the research suggests that achieving transfer is neither easy nor automatic. Thus, for both the individual teacher and law schools responding to the call to either improve or truncate legal education, it is a best practice to attend to educational strategies to improve transfer of learning, both from individual courses and the curriculum as a whole.
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Pathways, Integration, and Sequencing the Curriculum
Deborah Maranville and Cynthia Batt
Law school course offerings have proliferated in recent decades. This development reflects the addition of specialized doctrinal courses, a growing emphasis on interdisciplinary knowledge, and the incorporation of practice-oriented courses. From the perspective of the individual student, an expanded curriculum may create exciting educational opportunities while posing trade-offs between a generalist education and specialization.
Law schools face two key challenges. First, they must structure the curriculum so that the experiences of individual law students have some coherence, or, if you will, seem integrated. Second they must incorporate the full range of what the Carnegie Reports referred to as the apprenticeships of formal knowledge, professional skill, and identity and purpose and what the MacCrate Report and Best Practices for Legal Education previously articulated as knowledge, skills, and values.
This section discusses three approaches–not mutually exclusive–to structuring the law school curriculum. One way to strive for that goal is through course advising with structured pathways through the curriculum and concentrations. A second approach is to integrate the curriculum: connect the individual courses that a student takes, both those taken concurrently and across the years the student is enrolled in law school. The objective is that students have a sense that the learning in the various courses relates to and reinforces the learning in others. A third approach is to engage in a particular type of integration: sequence the curriculum by structuring offerings from introductory to intermediate to advanced, so that later classes build on the concepts and skills learned in earlier ones.
Although scattered integration and sequencing efforts date back decades, empirical research is not available to definitively confirm their status as best practices. Further experimentation with integration and sequencing is warranted as a best practice.
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Incorporating Experiential Education Throughout the Curriculum
Deborah Maranville, Cynthia Batt, Lisa Radtke Bliss, and Carolyn Wilkes Kaas
In discussing experiential education, Best Practices for Legal Education focused primarily on the three traditional types of separate experiential courses: in-house clinics, externships, and simulations, and treated them in a separate chapter. These courses were defined as those where “experience is a significant or primary method of instruction” rather than a secondary method, and where “students must perform complex skills in order to gain expertise.”
Arguably, this separate treatment reinforced what has too often been a divide between doctrinally-focused teaching and practice-focused teaching. Best Practices recognized that “experiential education can be employed as an adjunct to traditional methodologies regardless of class size” through methods such as incorporating simulation exercises into doctrinally-focused courses. It did so, however, only as part of its discussion of best practices for legal education generally.
This section builds on Best Practices by emphasizing the need to incorporate experiential education throughout the curriculum in order to maximize its educational impact. The term “experiential education” is, therefore, used to encompass both separate experiential courses and what will be termed “experiential modules.” Because a key distinction in experiential education is between simulated and real experiences, the term “clinical legal education” will be restricted to separate courses involving real experiences—law clinics, externships and offerings using alternative models, often termed “hybrids.” The term “law clinics” will be used to include both traditional in-house clinics taught by full-time faculty, and other structures that provide a similar level of intensive, integrated teaching and supervision.
As Best Practices suggested, it is helpful to distinguish “experiential learning” and “experiential education.” Both happen in law school, and in life; both are important. Experiential learning is simply a primary way that people learn on their own, whereas experiential education involves active and purposeful design and teaching. A focus on experiential education directs law schools and individual legal educators to their role in ensuring that maximum learning takes place beyond raw experience. The way in which each teacher integrates experiential education methods will often determine how far the students develop as lawyers in response to those methods. The way in which a law school designs and delivers a coherent array of courses to allow a student to progress from novice to (reasonably) competent professional in three short years will, more and more, define its efficacy, reputation, and leadership as a provider of legal education.
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