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.

Imagining Global Health with Justice: In Defense of the Right to Health.

Abstract: The singular message in Global Health Law is that we must strive to achieve global health with justice--improved population health, with a fairer distribution of benefits of good health. Global health entails ensuring the conditions of good health--public health, universal health coverage, and the social determinants of health--while justice requires closing today’s vast domestic and global health inequities. These conditions for good health should be incorporated into public policy, supplemented by specific actions to overcome barriers to equity. A new global health treaty grounded in the right to health and aimed at health equity--a Framework Convention on Global Health (FCGH)--stands out for its possibilities in helping to achieve global health with justice. This far-reaching legal instrument would establish minimum standards for universal health coverage and public health measures, with an accompanying national and international financing framework, require a constant focus on health equity, promote Health in All Policies and global governance for health, and advance the principles of good governance, including accountability. While achieving an FCGH is certainly ambitious, it is a struggle worth the efforts of us all. The treaty’s basis in the right to health, which has been agreed to by all governments, has powerful potential to form the foundation of global governance for health. From interpretations of UN treaty bodies to judgments of national courts, the right to health is now sufficiently articulated to serve this role, with the individual’s right to health best understood as a function of a social, political, and economic environment aimed at equity. However great the political challenge of securing state agreement to the FCGH, it is possible. States have joined other treaties with significant resource requirements and limitations on their sovereignty without significant reciprocal benefits from other states, while important state interests would benefit from the FCGH. And from integrating the FCGH into the existing human rights system to creative forms of compliance and enforcement and strengthened domestic legal and political accountability mechanisms, the treaty stands to improve right to health compliance. The potential for the FCGH to bring the right to health nearer universal reality calls for us to embark on the journey towards securing this global treaty.

Monitoring: The Behavioral Economics of Inducing Agents' Compliance with Legal Rules

Abstract: One of the many places where firms confront the difficulty of monitoring their agents is with respect to legal compliance. A firm wants its agents to be sensitive to legal requirements in order to minimize the threat of legal sanction and reputational harm that it faces when a violation occurs. For a variety of reasons, however, agents have a different set of compliance incentives. Recent years have brought an abundance of scholarly and practical literature on the task of organizational compliance. Firms are under increasing pressure to engage in aggressive "command and control"-style monitoring, which in turn raises questions about the net pay-offs from these efforts. Some critics say that greater attention to social institutions such as norms, culture and trust would actually produce better incentive compatibility, and higher rates of compliance, than high-pressure supervision. Thus, scores of articles advocate a more ethics or "integrity"-based effort at building compliance cultures within firms. But this remains a contested field, and diligent monitoring is still the baseline for most compliance initiatives. My specific interest in this paper is in what work in social and cognitive psychology - the stuff of contemporary behavioral law and economics - has to say about the task of compliance and this contest between hard and soft monitoring strategies. To be sure, the psychological work touching on this subject is tentative, often contestable, and always highly context-dependent, making it difficult to articulate strong, confident predictions about behavior in this setting. My aim, however, is slightly less ambitious. Most of the legal discourse on supervision and compliance today makes behavioral predictions while ignoring this body of research entirely. I am content to think about what normative conclusions might follow if it turns out that these psychological predictions are robust within firms.

Bioengineered Food--Safety and Labeling

Abstract: The safety and labeling of genetically engineered foods are two areas that have elicited considerable public concern and debate This Policy Forum provides a legal analysis of these issues in the context of two bills that have been recently proposed in The US Congress, the Genetically Engineered Food Safety Act and the Genetically Engineered Food Right to Know Act Most transgenic components of foods currently on the market are plant-incorporated protectants or their inert ingredients Therefore, they have been evaluated for safety by the Environmental Protection Agency (as well as the Food and Drug Administration), and their disclosure in labeling should not be required If plant-incorporated protectants are considered safer than chemical pesticides, and chemical pesticides do not have to be disclosed in labels, then bioengineered foods should not be subject to stricter regulation, nor should they be required to be labeled The two bills are inconsistent, in many respects, with well-established principles of food regulation

The Holocaust and the Germanization of Ukraine

Abstract: Introduction 1. From privileged to persecuted: the Black Sea Germans, 1800-1941 2. Sonderkommando R: the men and women who made Germans and created killers 3. Establishing Nazi rule in Transnistria 4. The mass murder of Transnistria's Jews, December 1941-April 1942 5. The Volksgemeinschaft in Transnistria, 1942-4 6. The Black Sea Germans and the Holocaust Conclusion.

The Hidden Limits of the Charitable Deduction: An Introduction to Hypersalience

Abstract: Behavioral economics introduced the concept of salience to law and economics. In the area of tax policy, salience refers to the prominence of taxes in the minds of taxpayers. This article complicates the literature on salience and taxation by introducing the concept of “hypersalience,” which is in many ways the mirror image of hidden taxation. While a revenue-raising tax provision must be hidden for taxpayers to underestimate their tax bill, a revenue-reducing tax provision – such as a deduction, exclusion, or credit – must be more than fully salient for taxpayers to underestimate their tax bill. In other words, the provision itself must be salient, but the limits of that provision must be hidden, or low-salience. This article uses the charitable deduction to illustrate the concept of hypersalience. While the charitable deduction is extremely salient to many taxpayers, not all taxpayers who believe that they will benefit from the deduction are correct. In fact, even though many Americans are aware that donations are tax-deductible, fewer than 50% of taxpayers can take advantage of the charitable deduction. The concept of hypersalience is important for several reasons. First, it highlights the role of non-governmental actors in fostering taxpayer ignorance about the tax system. This article suggests that the hypersalience of the charitable deduction is at least partly due to marketing efforts by private third-party beneficiaries. Second, it complicates economic models, such as those of price elasticity of giving, and suggests that certain tax provisions may be more treasury efficient than previously thought. Third, it may lead to increased consumption of certain goods. This article concludes that, although hypersalience may mean that the government is able to induce greater behavioral distortions without losing revenue, the costs of this phenomenon outweigh its benefits. Because hypersalience is due to taxpayer misunderstanding and the actions of third-party beneficiaries acting in their own interest, this article proposes several possible avenues for curtailing this phenomenon.