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.

Testing Ordinary Meaning

Abstract: Within legal scholarship and practice, among the most pervasive tasks is the interpretation of texts. And within legal interpretation, perhaps the most pervasive inquiry is the search for “ordinary meaning.” Jurists often treat ordinary meaning analysis as an empirical inquiry, aiming to discover a fact about how people understand language. When evaluating ordinary meaning, interpreters rely on dictionary definitions or patterns of common usage, increasingly via “legal corpus linguistics” approaches. However, the most central question about these popular methods remains open: Do they reliably reflect ordinary meaning? This Article presents a series of experiments that assess whether (a) dictionary definitions and (b) common usage data reflect (c) how people actually understand language today. The Article elaborates the implications of two main experimental results. First, neither the dictionary nor legal corpus linguistics methods reliably track ordinary people’s judgments about meaning. This shifts the argumentative burden to jurists who rely on these tools to identify “ordinary meaning” or “original public meaning”: these views must articulate and demonstrate a reliable method of analysis. Moreover, this divergence illuminates several interpretive fallacies. For example, advocates of legal corpus linguistics often contend that the nonappearance of a specific use in a corpus indicates that the use is not part of the relevant term’s ordinary meaning. The experiments reveal this claim to be a “Nonappearance Fallacy.” Ordinary meaning exceeds datasets of common usage — even very large ones. Second, dictionary and legal corpus linguistics verdicts diverge dramatically from each other. Part of that divergence is explained by the finding that broad dictionary definitions tend to direct interpreters to extensive interpretations, while data of common usage tends to point interpreters to more prototypical cases. This suggests two different criteria that are often relevant in interpretation: a more extensive criterion and a more narrow, prototypical criterion. Although dictionaries and corpus linguistics might, in some cases, help us identify these criteria, a hard legal-philosophical question remains: Which of these two criteria should guide the interpretation of terms and phrases in legal texts? Insofar as there is no compelling case to prefer one, the results suggest that dictionary definitions, legal corpus linguistics, or even other more scientific measures of meaning may not be equipped in principle to deliver simple and unequivocal answers to inquiries about the so-called “ordinary meaning” of legal texts.

Ebola: Towards an International Health Systems Fund

Abstract: The current outbreak of Ebola virus disease (EVD) in West Africa is spiraling out of control, but it never had to happen. What can the international community do now to bring the epidemic under control, and how can we prevent the next one?The counties most affected by Ebola (Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone), rank among the lowest in global development, lacking essential public health infrastructure. If the affected countries had adequate public health systems, they probably would have contained Ebola within rural settings, avoiding the first outbreak in major urban areas.More than 130 health workers have died from Ebola during the current outbreak, depleting already scarce human resources. Hospitals lack personal protective equipment and safe isolation facilities, becoming amplification points for transmission. The absence of basic public health infrastructure means that countries have instead often resorted to military-led cordons sanitaires, without ensuring access to basic necessities, such as food, clean water, and health care.This article proposes an International Health Systems Fund, encompassing both emergency response capabilities and enduring health-system development. The WHO’s Ebola response roadmap estimates than an initial US$490 million in global resources over 6 months would be needed to curb the outbreak, although the total costs are likely to be considerably higher. What is needed is a standing crisis fund to ensure surge capacity in the event of a WHO declared Public Health Emergency of International Concern.To prevent future epidemics, and to provide health services for the entire population, we also urgently need a sustainable International Health Systems Fund to build long-term capacity. This fund, however, would require multibillion-dollar investment. Although large, the international community has mobilized before on this scale through PEPFAR and the Global Fund.The West African Ebola epidemic should spark a badly needed global course correction that would favor strong health infrastructure. It would encourage high-income countries to meet their International Health Regulations obligations to mobilize financial resources and provide technical land logistical support to develop, strengthen, and maintain public health capacity, especially in lower-income countries. Although the scale of investment would be substantial, it is a wise and affordable investment in containing global health hazards, and moving towards a right-to-health based universal health coverage.

Introduction: Global Health and Human Rights

Abstract: This introduction highlights the foundational importance of human rights for global health and provides an academic framework for this book by laying out the role of human rights under international law as a basis for public health. Part I seeks to define the evolving conceptualization of health, examining both the shifting focus from medicine to public health and the shifting response from international health to global health. Framing global health as a human rights imperative, Part II examines the establishment of human rights under international law, the implementation of these rights in public policy, and the development of rights for public health. With this development of human rights giving rise to the field of “health and human rights,” Part III explores the recent birth of this interdisciplinary field, creating a field of practice that now requires a formal academic foundation. Part IV describes the academic contribution of this foundation text to the field and outlines the structure of this comprehensive volume, delineating the chapters that describe the normative development, policy implementation, contemporary application, and new challenges in the field. This introduction concludes by reaffirming the inextricable linkages between health and human rights, calling on scholars, practitioners, and advocates to work together to advance human rights in global health.

Probability, Presumptions and Evidentiary Burdens in Antitrust Analysis: Revitalizing the Rule of Reason for Exclusionary Conduct

Abstract: The conservative critique of antitrust law has been highly influential and has facilitated a transformation of antitrust standards of conduct since the 1970s and led to increasingly more permissive standards of conduct. While these changes have taken many forms, all were influenced by the view that competition law was over-deterrent. Critics relied heavily on the assumption that the durability and costs of false positive errors far exceeded those of false negatives. Many of the assumptions that guided this retrenchment of antitrust rules were mistaken and advances in the law and in economic analysis have rendered them anachronistic, particularly with respect to exclusionary conduct. Continued reliance on what are now exaggerated fears of “false positives,” and failure adequately to consider the harm from “false negatives,” has led courts to impose excessive demands of proof on plaintiffs that belie both established procedural norms and sound economic analysis. The result is not better and more reasonable antitrust standards, but instead an embedded ideological preference for non-intervention that creates a tendency toward false negatives, particularly in modern markets characterized by economies of scale and network effects. In this article, we explain how these erroneous assumptions about markets, institutions, and conduct have distorted the antitrust decision-making process and produced an excessive risk of false negatives in exclusionary conduct cases involving firms attempting to achieve, maintain, or enhance dominance or substantial market power. To redress this imbalance, we integrate modern economic analysis and the teaching of decision theory with the foundational conventions of antitrust law, which has long relied on probability, presumptions, and reasonable inferences to provide more effective means for evaluating competitive effects and resolving antitrust claims.