Sheldon Hannibal v. Secretary PA Dept Corr

USDC for the Eastern District of Pennsylvani

Jarvis Perry v. New Jersey Department of Corrections

USDC for the District of New Jerse

Edisson Barros Anguisaca v. Attorney General United States of America

Agenc

COVID-19 Tort Reform

In 2020 and 2021, 44 states and Washington, D.C. passed laws that limited tort liability related to COVID-19. The most common reforms immunized health care providers from malpractice or similar liability. A second category is limited liability to individuals or businesses for exposing others to the novel coronavirus. And a third category protected manufacturers of supplies used to detect and prevent COVID- 19 from products liability suits. The goals of these reforms included protecting health care providers from uncertainty in providing care for a novel disease, limiting the macroeconomic consequences of the pandemic, and encouraging the distribution of critical supplies to avoid shortages. States providing immunity assumed that institutions and individuals alike would react to reforms, as theory predicts, by engaging in more of the immunized activities. In general, the literature supports the assumption that institutions, like hospitals or manufacturers of face masks and COVID-19 tests, change their behavior in response to tort reform. Yet there is little empirical evidence demonstrating how tort law affects risk-taking by individuals. The lack of evidence about the relationship between tort law and individual decision-making is of broad interest, as one of the primary goals of tort law is to incentivize efficient levels of risk-taking. This Article provides novel empirical evidence on the effects of COVID-19 tort reform on public health. The analysis yields three important results. First, it shows that medical liability reforms had counterproductive public health effects. States that immunized health care providers from tort suits arising out of COVID-19 care experienced 20% more COVID-19 cases and 5% more COVID-19 hospitalizations. Second, the results demonstrate that exposure reforms counterintuitively decreased COVID-19 cases by making it easier for businesses and other institutions to require customers to comply with public health guidance. Third, the results reveal that tort law had very little effect, if any, on the precautions individuals chose to avoid contracting or spreading the disease. The third result is broadly interesting, as it indicates that tort law will be a weak incentive to individuals whenever they are choosing a level of care that can protect themselves or others

Kohlhaas v. State: Encouraging Democratic Reform Through Constitutional Flexibility

In the spirit of democracy reform, Alaska recently adopted a jungle primary and ranked choice voting electoral system for all state-wide elections. In Kohlhaas v. State, the Alaska Supreme Court upheld this reform against numerous state and federal constitutional challenges. While doing so, the court avoided rigid constitutional interpretations that would have frozen the electoral system in its current first-past-the-post state. Moreover, the court refused to credit the plaintiff\u27s speculation about the hypothetical malign effects of ranked-choice voting, placing the burden to produce hard evidence of their critiques on RCV\u27s opponents. Alaska can serve as a model for other states, as those states increasingly consider adopting electoral reforms of their own and must interpret similar state constitutional language

IIAAS and the Montreal Protocol: The Legal Minefield Inside the Most Successful Environmental Treaty in History

The most successful environmental treaty in history might break international law\u27s core principle, and it all depends on who you ask. International law consists of rules and principles relating to states, international organizations, and individuals. The source of all international law is the consent of nations, and each nation is governed by the treaties they consent to. Provisions that force states to behave according to its text and do not satisfy international law\u27s traditional consent standard are consequential. As no term exists for these provisions currently, these clauses have been termed as international imposed axiomatic alterations ( IIAA s). IIAAs, for this writing, are rules found within a treaty that compel states to act in a certain way despite that country not consenting to the rule. This Comment questions the legitimacy of what legal support these IIAAs hold