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.

Digital Smartphone Tracking for COVID-19: Public Health and Civil Liberties in Tension.

Abstract: Contact investigations have been a vital public health strategy, most recently in controlling tuberculosis and sexually transmitted infections including HIV. Yet, the sheer scale of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infections poses major challenges to contact investigations. Strategies in China, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan have supplemented traditional manual approaches with digital surveillance through smartphone applications. The US has not used digital surveillance as a tool, but Google, Apple, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), as well as 2 pan-European consortia and a variety of independent efforts are developing Bluetooth smartphone technology to enable rapid notification of users that they have had a close exposure to individuals diagnosed with medically verified coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). How does digital tracking differ from manual tracing? Although digital surveillance has the distinct advantages of scale and speed, does it confer sufficient public health benefit to justify adoption given privacy concerns? How do the design choices of digital contact tracing systems affect public health and privacy?

Criminal Law in Cyberspace

Abstract: Two of the most talked-about crimes of the year, the ILoveYou computer worm and the denial of service attacks on Yahoo, eBay, and ETrade, suggest that a new form of crime is emerging: cybercrime. Thousands of these crimes occur each year, and the results are often catastrophic; in terms of economic damage, the ILoveYou worm may have been the most devastating crime in history, causing more than $11 billion in losses. This paper asks how cybercrime is best deterred. It identifies five constraints on crime - legal sanctions, monetary perpetration cost, social norms, architecture, and physical risks - and explains how each of these constraints may be reduced by committing crime in cyberspace. The ease of cybercrime risks negative substitution effects, as offenders move away from realspace and look towards the Net. Because cybercrime requires fewer resources and less investment to cause a given level of harm, the law might want to use approaches that differ somewhat from those in realspace. In part, this is so because computers provide a cheaper means to perpetrate crime. Criminal law must be concerned not only with punishing crime ex post, but with creating ex ante barriers to inexpensive ways of carrying out criminal activity. For example, if computers serve as substitutes for conspirators, then law might develop doctrines that treat computers as quasi-conspirators and establish inchoate liability. Some government barriers, however, will create dead-weight losses. For example, encryption has the potential to further massive terrorism (which leads many in the law enforcement community to advocate its criminalization) but also the potential to facilitate greater security in communication and encourage freedom (which leads many others to push for unfettered access to the technology). To help solve such problems, the paper advocates the use of sentencing enhancements as tools that surgically target bad acts. Sentencing enhancements have received relatively little attention in the academic literature; this Article attempts to fill that gap. Cyberspace also adds additional parties to the traditional perpetrator-victim scenario of crime. In particular, much cybercrime is carried out through the use of Internet Service Providers. Law should impose modest responsibilities on third parties because doing so promotes cost deterrence and capitalizes on what Reinier Kraakman has called gatekeeper liability. Third parties can develop ways to make crime more expensive, and may be able to do so in ways that the government cannot always directly accomplish, such as cost effective regulation of the architecture of the Net. The same logic sometimes applies to victims of cybercrime; law can develop mechanisms to encourage optimal victim behavior as well. Burden-shifting must not, however, sacrifice the value of interconnectivity and network effects.

Why Soft Law Dominates International Finance - And Not Trade

Abstract: International financial law is in many ways a peculiar instrument of global economic affairs. Unlike international trade and monetary affairs, where global coordination is directed through formal international organizations, international financial law arises through inter-agency institutions with ambiguous legal status. Furthermore, the commitments made by regulatory officials participating in such forums are non-binding. This divergence is perplexing, especially when comparing international financial law to international trade. Both trade and finance comprise key areas of ‘international economic law’ and their rules have important distributive consequences for global markets and market participants. This article suggests that in order to understand soft law’s value as a coordinating mechanism, an institutional assessment of the way that law is enforced is necessary. Under close inspection, international financial law departs from traditional public international law notions of informality and can in fact be ‘harder’ than its soft-law quality suggests. This feature helps explain why international financial rules, though technically non-binding, are often relied upon. The predominance of international soft law in finance does not, however, imply that it is without flaws, and this article highlights important structural deficiencies that the World Trade Organization, a more mature legal regime, largely avoids.

The Human Rights of Persons with Mental Disabilities: A Global Perspective on the Application of Human Rights Principles to Mental Health

Abstract: This article examines the human rights of persons with mental disabilities and the application and development of these rights by the various international and regional systems that have been established to protect human rights. First, this article briefly examines three important relationships between mental health and human rights: 1) coercive mental health policies infringe on human rights; 2) invasions of human rights harm mental health; and 3) positive promotion of mental health and human rights has mutually reinforcing and synergistic results. Second, this article reviews sources of law within the United Nations system of human rights protection. Third, this article discusses regional human rights systems in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. These regional systems operate under human rights instruments distinct from the United Nations system and have achieved substantial progress in the development of human rights law relevant to persons with mental disabilities. Fourth, this article examines the application of civil and political rights to mental health by international and regional systems of human rights protection. The analysis focuses in depth on the most highly developed regional system of human rights protection — the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) within the Council of Europe — but also explores the intersection of human rights and mental health under the African and Inter-American regional systems. This part of the article demonstrates the vast potential of human rights law in three important areas of mental health policy: (1) the right to fundamental fairness in compulsory admission and subsequent detention in mental institutions — e.g., legal representation, a hearing, and use of independent experts; (2) the right to humane and dignified conditions of confinement — e.g., avoidance of neglectful or abusive conditions in mental hospitals and harmful or intrusive forms of medical treatment; and (3) protection of rights of citizenship — e.g., privacy, marriage, franchise, and association.Finally, the article discusses the application of social, economic, and cultural rights to mental health, particularly with respect to affirmative entitlements to mental health services. While the basis for recognizing economic, social, and cultural mental health rights exists in international and regional instruments, institutions at the international, regional, and domestic levels have been reluctant to pursue, define, or enforce such positive rights. The right to health, however, has undergone a significant evolution in recent years through the adoption of several significant instruments and reports at the international and regional levels. Concurrently, an expanding body of scholarly writing has examined the scope and application of the right to health. The idea of affirmative mental health rights can fundamentally advance the dignity and welfare of persons with mental disabilities. International human rights law, of course, leaves domestic governments with a wide range of discretion in relation to each of these rights and freedoms. Nevertheless, this body of international law opens each of these areas to serious external scrutiny and may provoke domestic governments to recognize and respect these rights and freedoms.

Stemming the Brain Drain — A WHO Global Code of Practice on International Recruitment of Health Personnel

Abstract: The world faces a shortage of about 4.3 million health professionals required for delivering essential services. The WHO Global Code of Practice on the International Recruitment of Health Personnel addresses the migration of health workers from lower-income countries.