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.

The Varieties and Limits of Transparency in U.S. Food Law

Abstract: A central goal of the federal legal system for food is to ensure the integrity of representations made by sellers of food about their products. To achieve transparency, the law of food deploys three different kinds of regulatory strategies: prohibitions against fraud, compelled disclosures, and constraints on discretionary disclosures. Collectively, these constraints create an enormous legal structure governing representations about the food we eat. Nevertheless, the transparency achieved by law is only partial, and indeed sometimes serves only to conceal a lie. Resource limits at federal agencies charged with regulating food hollow out enforcement programs aimed at false or misleading representations. Regulatory fragmentation ensures that agencies with very different cultures and missions preside, confusingly, over the transparency of the food system. Lopsided participation by food producers before the agencies works distortions in rules on mandatory disclosures. In these ways, the existing legal system for food fails to deliver the transparency it seems to promise. Moreover, the existing legal system does not even try to achieve the level of food-related awareness that many in the contemporary food movement would desire, awareness that would entail knowledge about the environmental, animal welfare, and human labor consequences of our food supply. I propose three ideas for improving understanding of our food supply: allowance of citizen suits under federal food laws, frank acknowledgment by federal agencies that they cannot adequately enforce these laws, and a good deal more skepticism on the part of consumers toward the reliability and credibility of representations made to them about their food.

Deconstructing Section 11: Public Offering Liability in a Continuous Disclosure Environment

Abstract: This paper considers whether the prevailing liability structure under Section 11 of the Securities Act of 1933 makes sense as applied to large capitalization issuers. This, in turn, requires an evaluation of whether the alternative structure for liability, that under Rule 10b-5 and the periodic disclosure requirements of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, is sufficient or deficient in terms of promoting adequate disclosure. The paper suggests some fine-tuning under the '34 Act designed to bring better external certification, particularly by accountants, into the picture. More radical reforms are justified under the '33 Act, including the essential abandonment of underwriter due diligence liability.

Illicit Trade Poses No Threat to an FDA Rule to Minimize Nicotine in Smoked Tobacco Products

Abstract: A US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rule setting nicotine limits for cigarettes and similarly smoked tobacco products at the lowest technically achievable levels would produce extraordinarily large and rapid smoking declines. Smokers could not satisfy or sustain their nicotine addiction by smoking legal products. Minors experimenting with smoking could not become physically addicted, and any gateway from youth e-cigarette use into smoking would be closed. Even with pessimistic assumptions, tens of millions of smokers would quit, switch to non-smoked products, reduce their smoking, or never start, saving millions of lives. No other FDA action could do as much to reduce tobacco harms and costs more quickly. Moreover, any related new illicit trade that might emerge would inevitably be too small to interfere seriously with the nicotine rule’s public health gains.

Regulating Software When Everything Has Software

Abstract: This Article identifies a profound, ongoing shift in the modern administrative state: from the regulation of things to the regulation of code. This shift has and will continue to place previously isolated agencies in an increasing state of overlap, raising the likelihood of inconsistent regulations and putting seemingly disparate policy goals, like privacy, safety, environmental protection, and copyright enforcement, in tension. This Article explores this problem through a series of case studies and articulates a taxonomy of code regulations to help place hardware-turned-code rules in context. The Article considers the likely turf wars, regulatory thickets, and related dynamics that are likely to arise, and closes by considering the benefits of creating a new agency with some degree of centralized authority over software regulation issues.