Georgetown University Law Center

About: Georgetown University Law Center is a based out in . It is known for research contribution in the topics: Supreme court & Public health. The organization has 585 authors who have published 2488 publications receiving 36650 citations. The organization is also known as: Georgetown Law & GULC.

Where the Wetlands Are—And Where They Are Going: Legal and Policy Tools for Facilitating Coastal Ecosystem Migration in Response to Sea-Level Rise

Abstract: As sea levels rise, coastal wetlands are encountering physical barriers to inland migration in a phenomenon known as “coastal squeeze.” Specifically, wetlands are being squeezed between sea-level rise on one side and human development on the other preventing their natural ability to adapt by moving to higher ground. State and local coastal governments have legal and policy tools available to adapt to sea-level rise and limit the impacts of coastal squeeze on migrating wetlands. This article presents legal and policy tools and considerations governments could evaluate to facilitate long-term wetland conservation and migration to maximize benefits for people, the environment, and economies. This article first provides legal background on the law and federal, state, and local actors that could impact state and local decisions. This article then identifies five primary components of a comprehensive wetland migration strategy for state and local coastal governments: (1.) data; (2.) planning; (3.) voluntary land acquisitions; (4.) legal tools; and (5.) community engagement. This article also includes case study examples. Decisionmakers could potentially integrate any of these five components into existing coastal, environmental, land-use, and climate adaptation efforts to align policy objectives to protect wetlands across different programs and projects.

The Limits of Government Regulation of Science

Abstract: Last summer, two research teams funded by the National Institutes of Health genetically modified H5N1 avian influenza viruses, making them capable of efficient respiratory transmission between ferrets. Ferrets are thought to be a good animal model for influenza in humans. A small number of genetic changes might be able to convert the presently zoonotic H5N1 virus into a pathogen with dangerous pandemic potential—transmissible from human-to-human, with a >50% case-fatality rate. The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB), which advises the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), recommended that two journals, Science and Nature , redact key information before publication. The NSABB and HHS expressed concerns that published details about the papers' methodology and results could become a blueprint for bioterrorism ( 1 ).

Pandora's Digital Box: The Promise and Perils of Digital Wallets

Abstract: Digital wallets, such as ApplePay and Android Pay, are “smart” payment devices that can integrate payments with two-way, real-time communications of any type of data. Integration of payments with real-time communications holds out tremendous promise for consumers and merchants alike: the combination, in a single, convenient platform, of search functions, advertising, payment, shipping, customer service, and loyalty programs. Such an integrated retail platform offers consumers a faster and easier way to transact, and offers brick-and-mortar retailers an ecommerce-type ability to identify, attract, and retain customers. At the same time, however, digital wallets present materially different risks for both consumers and merchants than traditional plastic card payments precisely because of their “smart” nature.For consumers, digital wallets can trigger an unfavorable shift in the applicable legal regime governing the transactions, increase fraud risk, create confusion regarding error resolution, expose consumers to non-FDIC-insured accounts, and substantially erode transactional privacy. These risks are often not salient to consumers, who cannot distinguish them by digital wallet. Consumers’ inability to protect against these risks points to a need for regulatory intervention by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to ensure minimum standards for digital wallets.For merchants, digital wallets can deprive them of valuable customer information used for anti-fraud, advertising, loyalty, and customer service purposes. Digital wallets can also facilitate poaching of customers by competitors, impair merchants’ customer relationship management, deprive merchants of influence over consumers’ payment choice and routing, increase fraud risk, subject merchants to patent infringement liability, and ultimately increase the costs of accepting payments. Merchants are constrained in their ability to refuse or condition payments from digital wallets based on the risks presented because of merchant rules promulgated by credit card networks. These rules raise antitrust concerns because they foreclose entry to those digital wallets that offer merchants the most attractive valuation proposition, namely those wallets that do not use the credit card networks for payments.

Law and Fancy

Abstract: Martha Nussbaum's graceful book Poetic Justice is an elegant brief for the importance of our capacity for imaginative "fancy" to our moral and legal lives. Imaginative fancy, Nussbaum argues, allows us to know the internal substance and quality of the lives of others. It allows us to come to appreciate, to understand, to share, and ultimately to resist others' suffering. It is, in short, the means by which we come to care about the fate and happiness of others. It is a part, but not the whole, of our capacity to transcend a narcissistic and infantile egoism. It is therefore central, not peripheral, to our capacity for moral judgment, and it is accordingly central, not peripheral, to our lives as public citizens. Fancy is a part, not the whole, of what prompts us toward a generous, humanistic, egalitarian, and democratic stance toward others. Fancy is a part, not the whole, of what enables us to give a due regard to the individuality, the dignity, and the irreducible worth of our fellows. Given its importance to our moral, political, and legal lives Nussbaum argues, we should not only study our capacity for imaginative fancy, but we should also value, nurture, and encourage it. Reading modem realistic fiction, particularly (but not only) in novel form, is central to that end. The modem realistic novel, Nussbaum argues, is the fanciful genre, par excellence. Through reading realistic novels -- and only to a lesser extent watching films or reading history -- we come to understand the most important promise the book contains, however, may be implicit rather than explicit. In this work and elsewhere, Nussbaum acts on her clearly deeply felt conviction that the western literary and philosophical canon, correctly and critically read, suggests a case for a moral and political structure that is at once humanistic, egalitarian, generous, and liberal in its respect for individuals and communities alike. If sustainable, this is a claim of tremendous importance and great hope, not only to law-and-literature or law-and-humanities scholars, but obviously for all engaged citizens in liberal societies. Poetic Justice does not directly argue for this claim although the first two chapters in particular -- which rest almost entirely on interpretations of Dickens's Hard Times -- suggest it. Although they are never spelled out quite this explicitly, at least three arguments run through Poetic Justice regarding the relation between fancy and our moral lives. First, Nussbaum directs her elaboration of the capacity for fancy, and its relation to novelistic realism, to an internal, decidedly friendly critique of utilitarianism. The second argument, elaborated upon in the third chapter, is in my view the heart of the book. In this chapter, Nussbaum argues that fancy relates not just to utilitarianism or to sound normative economics, but to moral decisionmaking generally. The third argument, alluded to throughout the book but most explicitly stated in the final chapter, Poets as Judges, is that fancy informs not just our moral sense, but, more specifically, our sense of justice. I will not comment here on the arguments of the first chapter of Nussbaum's book - that utilitarianism or normative economics, or both, uninformed by narrative wisdom risk being sterile, and that a sensitive reading of both Dickens's Hard Times and Wright's Native Son underscores that truth.