Stakeholder Views on Lessons Learned for the Antimicrobial Resistance Panel from Previous International Science Panels [version 1]

The United Nations General Assembly called in September 2024 for the establishment of an independent panel for actionable evidence against antimicrobial resistance (IPEA). The task of designing the panel was given to the Quadripartite Joint Secretariat (QJS) on Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) with a delivery timeline of 15 months. To promote stakeholder thought and input around what this panel should look like and how it should work, which could feed into the QJS’s consultation process, we independently commissioned seven papers to examine lessons that could be learned from other high-level scientific panels. We then called a convening of stakeholders that were primed with the background papers. The stakeholder workshop was attended by 85 invitees, comprised of AMR stakeholders with expertise in all One Health sectors. The workshop, held in Lagos, Nigeria in April 2025, drew representation from around the world. Most stakeholder attendees were based in a low- or middle-income country and Africa sent more attendees than any other continent. Stakeholder input around preferences for IPEA’s structure and governance, science and content, and goals and output was collated in small group roundtable discussions, and plenary polling. Summary outputs were shared in plenaries and are documented in this perspective and stakeholder attendees were urged to contribute to the formal consultation, which is managed by the QJS

Technology-Facilitated Labor Trafficking Power and Control Wheel

This wheel is based on the Article, Digital Servitude , forthcoming in the Boston College Law Review

Birthdate Phaseout

This article explores the Nicotine Free Generation (NFG) policy, an emerging endgame strategy for tobacco products that employs a completely novel legal design. Tobacco remains the leading cause of preventable death, killing almost half of its users and imposing $600 billion in social costs each year. We see two basic choices for regulating sales: Prohibition, or a legal age-gate, such as 21 for retail sales. NFG charts a third way. Recognizing the dire harm of tobacco, and the serious consequences of abrupt prohibition, NFG lays the groundwork for a gradual transition to a sales sunset. In place of the 21 age-gate, NFG creates a divide between those who are of age and those who are not when the law passes, using a birthdate to divide the two cohorts. For those of age when the birthdate is set, NFG leaves the existing market in place, and so it delivers no shock to the market or social practices. It focuses instead on preventing the creation of future demand by preventing sales to everyone born after the designated birth date. NFG\u27s gradualism is in stark contrast to Prohibition\u27s comprehensive ban, which removed a product from people who used it. The market for tobacco products exists at the juncture of addiction and adolescence. Both are essential to its continued existence, with adolescence being the spark and addiction the fuel to long-term sales revenue. NFG takes addiction seriously, by exempting from the regulation\u27s impact those people who are currently dependent on the product. NFG has been adopted in seventeen cities and towns in Massachusetts and introduced in five state legislatures, as well as in a number of other countries. This article is the first to evaluate NFG\u27s legal design, explaining the way it finesses the challenges of adolescence and of addiction to provide a hopeful path and to set an example for endgame strategies in other fields

Corporate Scenarios: Drawing Lessons from History

As corporations are increasingly pressed to reveal information about their exposure to climate-related risks, they are often asked to undertake and disclose the outcome of “scenario analysis.” In this exercise, corporations, including financial institutions, examine how their business would fare under different pathways the future may take. One oft-used scenario, for example, is the International Energy Agency’s “Net-Zero by 2050: A Roadmap for the Energy Sector.” This Essay presents a history of the use of scenarios as a corporate planning tool, particularly in the oil industry, arguing that it is key for understanding our present moment and the role of today’s scenarios in corporate governance. Scenarios are a useful tool, but who makes them matters

The Rising Returns to R&D: Ideas Are not Getting Harder to Find

R&D investment has grown robustly, yet aggregate productivity growth has stagnated. Is this because “ideas are getting harder to find”? This paper uses micro-data from the US Census Bureau to explore the relationship between R&D and productivity in the manufacturing sector from 1976 to 2018. We find that both the elasticity of output (TFP) with respect to R&D and the marginal returns to R&D have risen sharply. Exploring factors affecting returns, we conclude that R&D obsolescence rates must have risen. Using a novel estimation approach, we find consistent evidence of sharply rising technological rivalry. These findings suggest that R&D has become more effective at finding productivity-enhancing ideas but these ideas may also render rivals’ technologies obsolete, making innovations more transient

Automatic Reaction - What Happens to Workers at Firms that Automate?

We provide the first estimate of the impacts of automation on individual workers by combining Dutch micro-data with a direct measure of automation expenditures covering firms in all private non-financial industries over 2000-2016. Using an event study differences-indifferences design, we find that automation at the firm increases the probability of workers separating from their employers and decreases days worked, leading to a 5-year cumulative wage income loss of about 8% of one year’s earnings for incumbent workers. We find little change in wage rates. Further, lost wage earnings are only partially offset by various benefits systems and are disproportionately borne by older workers and workers with longer firm tenure. Compared to findings from a literature on mass layoffs, the effects of automation are more gradual and automation displaces far fewer workers, both at the individual firms and in the workforce overall

Can Legal Knowledge Save Lives? A Randomized Experiment in Preventive Health Screenings

While the U.S. healthcare system typically imposes significant out-of-pocket costs, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) requires full insurance coverage for certain preventive health services (PHS), including cancer screenings, without cost-sharing. Despite this policy, one in four eligible Americans remains unscreened for breast, colorectal, and cervical cancer, which increases their risk of premature death. We hypothesize that a lack of awareness about the ACA’s free care requirement contributes to this gap and that explicitly informing patients could increase screening uptake. Additionally, we investigate whether prior experiences with medical debt deter individuals from seeking even cost-free care, reflecting a spillover effect of broader healthcare cost burdens. We conducted an online survey experiment with 3,354 insured U.S. adults aged 30–74 with moderate household incomes ($30k–$99k), and we determined whether each one was qualified for a free cancer screen based on age and sex. Among them, 1,406 had not received at least one recommended cancer screening. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions in a 2×2 factorial design. In the “free care disclosure” (FCD) treatment, half were informed that ACA-required screenings are fully covered without copays or deductibles. In the “medical debt salience” (MDS) treatment, half were asked about their medical debt history before assessing screening intentions. In addition to measures of intention, the primary outcome was behavioral—whether participants requested a link to take a step toward screening, a proxy for screening behavior, which we were not able to observe directly. We also tracked self-expressed intentions to get screened. As hypothesized, FCD increased screening-related action by 5 percentage points (p = .031). Effects varied by cancer type, with larger effects for colon and cervical cancers, but with no impact—and a potential negative (non-significant) effect—for breast cancer screening. Survey responses were consistent with this experimental finding for FCD overall, with “costs or coverage” being the third most common reason respondents cited for having not gotten screening (at 45% of respondents), and with large majorities agreeing that “going to the doctor or hospital can be dangerous financially” (80% agreeing), “the American healthcare system is full of tricks and traps” (65% agreeing) and “in America, healthcare is never really free” (91% agreeing). MDS had no direct effect on behavior, but contrary to hypothesis, individuals with medical debt were more likely to seek screening than those without (p = .011). These findings suggest that lack of awareness about the law providing free preventive care is a significant barrier to screening. Proactive communication by clinicians or public health officials could save lives. The larger paradigm of cost-exposure has a negative spillover, and ignorance of this benefit may be a preventable cause of cancer-related mortality

Book Review: How to Set Up and Run a Law Clinic

This book answers many questions for those tasked with deciding whether and how to fund a law school clinic. It also provides metrics by which to evaluate the operations of a clinic. And finally, this book addresses not just how best to run a clinic, but in many ways how best to deliver legal services to a community in great need of legal help, whether through a law school program or in the neighborhood. It answers questions every legal aid office in the world with limited resources must answer: how to choose clients, how to decide which services the clients will receive, and from whom, and how to deliver those legal services. This review essay will proceed as follows. It explores the major themes of each chapter, and how these ideas may be useful to a wide audience. The review attempts to guide its reader to those chapters that will be most helpful for those who do not have time to read everything, and it suggests avenues to explore ideas further

Normalizing Facial Recognition Technology and the End of Obscurity

This article argues that facial recognition technology is the most dangerous surveillance tool ever invented. Given the unique threats this morally suspect tool poses to privacy, civil liberties, human flourishing, and democracy, the only appropriate response is a ban. To justify our position, we explain why facial recognition is distinctive among biometrics, clarify how even seemingly benign and positive uses of the technology can trigger dangerous normalization dynamics, and pinpoint why current United States laws (with reverberations in the EU’s AI Act) are designed to accelerate a slippery slope that makes mass surveillance nearly inevitable. Our most fundamental contribution lies in demonstrating how the concept of “obscurity” connects all three arguments: facial recognition algorithms technologically eviscerate obscurity, normalization psychologically undermines it, and the law doctrinally abandons it - a perfect storm that only prohibition can stop

How Theories of Art Can Inform Debates About AI

Debates about artificial intelligence (AI) tend to swing between the optimistic and the apocalyptic. I propose a less binary approach that frames conversations about AI from the perspectives of theories of art and creativity. Whether we agree that AI is artificial or intelligent, whether it should be constrained or liberated, we cannot deny its influence on literary, artistic, and innovative production. AI may be described as simply a new tool to produce art and science, like the camera or the microscope, or it may transform art and science, the way the internet transformed global communication. Either way, these debates about AI concern its relationship to treasured human activity, and thus, this Essay asserts, they have something to learn from philosophies of art and aesthetics. Copyright law may be the most obvious legal regime to address some of AI’s effects on creative practices, but copyright cannot and should not solve the problems AI raises for artists and authors. Better automation (improved technology) or more precise laws (targeting harms) inadequately address the problems generative-AI pose. Instead, art history and aesthetic theory – and its attention to literature, painting, poetry, music or any other art form (or “artifice”) – provide better frameworks for thinking about the challenges and opportunities of generative-AI because of their focus on struggles over our common humanity