Evading Emergency: Strengthening Emergency Response Through Integrated Pluralistic Governance

This Article examines the significant governance challenges that arise during responses to public health emergencies and proposes a new multifaceted strategy-integrated pluralistic governance-to address these challenges. Emergency preparedness is an inherently complex problem that entails the integration ofscientific and medical expertise, good logistical planning, and clear laws and policies. The governance function has particular import for public health emergencies because pandemics, hurricanes, and other disasters can have profoundly divisive social and political consequences. Moreover, recent disasters like Hurricane Katrina and the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill revealed an emergency preparedness and response infrastructure in the United States that was broken: starved of necessary resources, beset by problems at all levels of government, and undermined by poor decision making at each of these levels. Governance theories are particularly relevant to addressing the challenges posed by public health emergencies because these theories can help to explain and shape outcomes within complex systems. This Article delineates and explores three categories of governance models: traditional governance models, New Governance models, and diffuse governance models. These models provide insight into existing efforts to govern public health emergencies within and outside of formal emergency response systems and highlight unexplored avenues for strengthening these systems. Integrated pluralistic governance adopts aspects of all three governance models and encourages the development of concurrency, coordination, and redundancy to create a more effective and resilient public health emergency response system

The Human Rights of Persons with Mental Disabilities: a Global Perspective on the Application of Human Rights Principles to Mental Health

This Article examines the human rights of persons with mental disabilities and the application and development of these rights by the various international and regional systems that have been established to protect human rights. An international system of human rights with universal application has been developed under the auspices of the United Nations. Regional human rights systems have applied additional human rights protections to their respective geographic regions. Both the international and regional systems have addressed the human rights of persons with mental disabilities through treaties, declarations, and thematic resolutions. Moreover, regional institutions have incrementally formulated a body of law that protects the human rights of persons with mental disabilities. These international systems, documents, institutions, and legal rulings have collectively spurred the development of tangible and recognizable human rights standards at the international and regional levels; they have also brought to light, and in some cases put an end to, ongoing human rights violations targeting persons with mental disabilities. Further, the legal precedent and public pressure created by this body of international law has encouraged domestic governments to apply human rights principles to their policies affecting mentally disabled individuals at the national and sub-national level. This Article devotes particular attention to the well-developed jurisprudence within the European system for the protection of human rights. This regional human rights system has advanced a rich and nuanced body of law protecting the human rights of persons with mental disabilities

Global Health Rights: Employing Human Rights to Develop and Implement the Framework Convention on Global Health

The Framework Convention on Global Health (FCGH) represents an important idea for addressing the expanding array of governance challenges in global health. Proponents of the FCGH suggest that it could further the right to health through its incorporation of rights into national laws and policies, using litigation and community empowerment to advance rights claims and prominently establish the right to health as central to global health governance. Building on efforts to expand development and influence of the right to health through the implementation of the FCGH, in this article we find that human rights correspondingly holds promise in justifying the FCGH. By employing human rights as a means to develop and implement the FCGH, the existing and evolving frameworks of human rights can complement efforts to reform global health governance, with the FCGH and human rights serving as mutually reinforcing bases of norms and accountability in global health

The Future of Wastewater Monitoring for the Public Health

This Article thus expands the extant literature by considering the legal and ethical dimensions of wastewater surveillance more thoroughly and more broadly. It arrives at an auspicious time, as the United States moves into a vaccine-mediated phase in which COVID-19 is less likely to give rise to broad stay-at-home orders and more likely to trigger narrower, more targeted interventions. It seeks to offer guidance for the legal and ethical use of wastewater surveillance along two dimensions. The first dimension considers the circumstances under which wastewater monitoring should be deployed for detecting and responding to COVID-19 specifically. The second dimension zooms out, to consider whether and how this surveillance infrastructure, largely created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, might be deployed for other uses, and examines the legal and ethical difficulties that may attend these broader uses