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 Difference Narrows: A Reply to Kurt Lash

Abstract: We thank the Notre Dame Law Review for allowing us to respond to Kurt Lash’s reply to our critique of his interpretation of the Privileges or Immunities Clause. We could forgive readers for having difficulty adjudicating this dispute. When Lash argues, evidence always comes pouring forth, and the sheer volume can overwhelm the senses. We sometimes have a hard time following his arguments, and we are experts in the field. We can only imagine how it seems to those who are otherwise unfamiliar with this terrain. So, in this reply — with a few exceptions — we will avoid piling up any new evidence and will instead offer succinct counterpoints to his points. Above all, we wish to stress the narrowness of our disagreement — narrowness that is easily obscured by the presentation of one source after another. As we did in our original article, we start with our points of agreement — which Lash repeatedly characterizes as “concessions.”

Making CLE Voluntary and Pro Bono Mandatory: A Law Faculty Test Case

Abstract: The vast majority of attorneys in this country are required to complete 10 to 15 hours of continuing legal education (“CLE”) every year, an experience well summarized by one attendee’s observation that “[k]nowledge is good, but coerced seat time is wasteful [and] insulting.” The primary rationale for mandatory CLE is to help ensure competent client representation, but the mandatory system fails to achieve that goal. Instead, mandatory CLE has become a self-perpetuating industry that earns hundreds of millions of tuition dollars for course purveyors but demonstrates little, if any, connection to better serving the public. By contrast, almost no attorney is required to complete a single hour of pro bono service. Although the American Bar Association (“ABA”) recognizes the “critical” need for free legal services for “persons of limited means,” attorneys simply are encouraged to volunteer their time. This voluntary pro bono system has proven to be so woefully inadequate that Justice Sonia Sotomayor recently declared her support for a “forced labor” approach to attorneys’ pro bono responsibilities. Responding to this critical need, a current trend in the profession focuses on requiring pro bono service from law students and bar applicants — easy marks with little ability to protest. This effort, however, sidesteps the harder question of mandatory pro bono for licensed attorneys, including the law professors who may be an aspiring attorney’s first professional role models. More than a decade ago, Dean Erwin Chemerinsky argued in favor of mandatory pro bono service for law faculty, hoping to “at least induce debate and force examination of how to better engage law professors in using their talents to help those who need it.” That debate has yet to materialize. Law professors have at least as much of an obligation as other attorneys to provide pro bono service, but their resistance to doing so has resulted in rates of participation that Professor Deborah Rhode has described as “shameful.” This Article argues that the time is ripe to upend the status quo — to eliminate mandatory CLE and to explore replacing mandatory CLE hours with required pro bono service hours.

The Limits of Government Regulation of Science

Abstract: The recent controversy over the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity’s (NSABB) request that Science and Nature redact key parts of two papers on transmissible avian (H5N1) influenza reveal a troubled relationship between science and security. While NSABB’s request does not violate the First Amendment, efforts to censor the scientific press by force of law would usually be an unconstitutional prior restraint of the press absent a compelling state interest. The constitutional validity of conditions on grant funding to require pre-publication review of unclassified research is unclear but also arguably unconstitutional.The clearest case where government may restrict publication is when research has been properly classified as a security risk. It is less clear whether government may suppress the publication of “controlled unclassified information” (CUI). The key inquiry is whether the information poses a genuine security risk and the restraint is the least restrictive alternative.At the same time, the federal government has fairly broad latitude to protect sensitive data in its sole possession from disclosure under FOIA.We propose that future decisions on dual-use research should be taken through a fair and transparent institutional review process, likely best modeled on the institutional biosafety committees required for recombinant DNA research.

Conditional Spending After NFIB v. Sebelius : The Example of Federal Education Law

Abstract: In NFIB v. Sebelius, the Supreme Court’s recent case addressing the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, the Court concluded that the expansion of Medicaid in that Act was unconstitutionally coercive and therefore exceeded the scope of Congress’s authority under the Spending Clause. This was the first time that the Court treated coercion as an issue of more than mere theoretical possibility under the Spending Clause. In the wake of the Court’s decision, commentators have expressed either the concern or the hope that NFIB’s coercion analysis may lead to the undoing of much of the federal regulatory state, which substantially relies on the spending power. This article argues that both this concern and this hope are misplaced. Taking federal education law as a test case for future coercion analysis — since federal funding given to the states for elementary and secondary education is second only to federal funding for Medicaid — the article concludes that NFIB’s coercion inquiry is unlikely to lead to much else being found unconstitutional. The major federal education laws, and by implication other conditional spending laws, will not likely find their demise under the Court’s analysis. Nonetheless, NFIB will likely have some effect on the future of federal education law. It should put a damper on calls to dramatically increase federal education funding; encourage the trend towards smaller grants of limited duration, especially those that bypass the states; result in some structural changes both in funding and enforcement; and, somewhat paradoxically for a decision that found the Medicaid enforcement regime coercive, may lead to greater federal enforcement of conditional spending laws.