Population Denominators: Measuring Risk to Improve Health and Well-being

Population denominator numbers stratified age, race, gender, county and zip code are essential public health tools in determining disease burden and risk. Accurate disease incidence and prevalence data are needed by state and local health care providers and public policy makers to appropriately target health service delivery and public health interventions

SLIDES: A Water Manager\u27s Perspective: A View from the Field

Presenter: Jeffrey Kightlinger, General Counsel, Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD) 21 slide

The Gathering Twilight? Information Privacy on the Internet in the Post-Enlightenment Era

The steady stream of news reports about violations of privacy on the Internet has spawned a growing body of literature discussing the legal protections available for personally identifiable information—i.e., information about identified or identifiable persons—collected via the Internet. This Article takes the discussion of Internet privacy protection in a new and very different direction by reexamining the U.S. Internet privacy regime from the perspective of a broader cultural/historical analysis and critique. The perspective adopted is that of Alasdair MacIntyre\u27s account of the disarray in Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment discourse about morality and human nature and the accompanying disappearance of rational justifications for decisions and institutions grounded in that discourse. The argument of this Article proceeds in four stages. Section II briefly outlines the transition from the older paradigm to the modern, post-Enlightenment paradigm, drawing heavily on Alasdair MacIntyre\u27s account of the relationships among the individual, the market, and the administrative state. Section III explicates the legal principles of the U.S. Internet privacy regime. Section IV sets those legal principles in a broader context of legal theories concerning the administrative state, drawing in particular on the work of Robert Rabin and other scholars in the field of administrative law. Finally, Section V argues that the U.S. Internet privacy regime reflects and reinforces key tenets of the post-Enlightenment paradigm. In particular, the regime emphasizes protecting the individual who competes in a market and empowering impersonal bureaucratic authority as the guarantor of the individual\u27s privacy

A Solution to the Yahoo! Problem? The EC E-Commerce Directive as a Model for International Cooperation on Internet Choice of Law

In May 2000, a French court decided that a French law banning the display of Nazi materials for sale applies to an auction website hosted by the California-based company Yahoo! Inc. The following year, at the request of Yahoo! Inc., a U.S. District Court declared that the French judgment was unenforceable in the United States because enforcing it would violate an important public policy-the First Amendment. These two cases have attracted considerable attention because they crystallize a difficult problem. The Internet is global. Every website potentially reaches every home on the planet. Thus, website content or activity that may be legal in the country where the website\u27s operator is based may reach countries where such content or activity is illegal. Which law or laws should apply to the website? Should a website be subject only to the laws of the country where the website operator is based? Or should a website be forced to comply with the laws of every country where the website may be accessible-potentially every country on Earth? In the Yahoo! case, the French court concluded that French law applies to a website regardless of the domicile of the website operator. While not rejecting the French court\u27s analysis of the problem, the U.S. court registered a caveat, essentially holding that at least some fundamental U.S. legal principles should apply to website operators based in the United States, regardless of where their websites may be accessible. Much of the debate surrounding the French court\u27s decision and the U.S. court\u27s response has centered—not surprisingly—around whether the courts reached the correct conclusions, and what the implications of those conclusions might be for the future of the Internet. Instead of attacking or defending the French or the U.S. courts, this Article proposes to focus on the Yahoo! case from a different perspective. As is argued in this Article, disputes like the Yahoo! case over which country\u27s laws apply to a website and its operator seem likely to proliferate as Internet usage expands, demanding significant enforcement resources from countries and posing important compliance challenges for companies and other organizations operating on the Internet. Thus, it may be useful to consider developing an international agreement that would address, and in many instances resolve, such disputes about “jurisdiction to prescribe” rules for the Internet. In developing this argument, this Article uses as its point of departure a set of rules that already applies to France—one of the protagonists in the Yahoo! case

A Solution to the \u3cem\u3eYahoo!\u3c/em\u3e Problem? The EC E-Commerce Directive as a Model for International Cooperation on Internet Choice of Law

Instead of attacking or defending the French or the U.S. courts, this Article proposes to focus on the Yahoo! case from a different perspective. As is argued in Section III.D below, disputes like the Yahoo! case over which country\u27s laws apply to a website and its operator seem likely to proliferate as Internet usage expands, demanding significant enforcement resources from countries and posing important compliance challenges for companies and other organizations operating on the Internet. Thus, it may be useful to consider developing an international agreement that would address, and in many instances resolve, such disputes about jurisdiction to prescribe” rules for the Internet. In developing this argument, this Article uses as its point of departure a set of rules that already applies to France-one of the protagonists in the Yahoo! case

Two and a Half Ethical Theories: Re-Examining the Foundations of the Carnegie Report

In the past three years, the American Bar Association, several major state bar associations, the Association of American Law Schools, the New York Times, law students, and many legal educators have called for fundamental changes in the way we educate new lawyers. Some critics have suggested that legal education faces a crisis that will be exacerbated by rising tuitions, declining enrollments, and a precipitous drop in the demand for new lawyers. Most of those calling for change have relied on the critical analysis of modem legal education presented in a 2007 report by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching entitled Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law. Despite the central role of the Carnegie Report in current debates about legal-education reform, however, no one has yet made a careful study of the theoretical foundations and, in particular, the ethical grounding of the Report itself. This Article fills that important gap in the literature by critically analyzing the three ethical frameworks that organize and underpin various aspects of the Report\u27s account of modem legal education and its failings. Although a teleological ethical framework with roots in the philosophy of Aristotle provides the Report\u27s backbone, the Report\u27s treatment of that framework is incomplete, somewhat careless, and ultimately unconvincing. Competing with the teleological framework throughout the Report are an emotivist framework with relativist and possibly nihilist implications and a contractarian framework that makes little sense on its own terms and contradicts key assumptions of the core teleological framework. Before we can justify implementing educational reforms based on the Carnegie Report\u27s analysis and recommendations, we must do a great deal of additional scholarly work to resolve a number of basic theoretical problems that threaten to undermine the intellectual foundations of the Report itself. Otherwise, efforts to reform legal education may do little more than build glass houses on shifting sands

Nihilism with a Happy Ending? The Interstate Commerce Commission and the Emergence of the Post-Enlightenment Paradigm

This Article examines early Supreme Court opinions about the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC)—the first federal administrative agency—in an effort to identify the intellectual roots of the modern administrative state. The Article argues that the Court\u27s effort to explain and justify the function of the newborn ICC shows the traces of a post-Enlightenment crisis in the field of moral philosophy—i.e., the growing conviction that it is no longer possible for reasonable people to agree on what constitutes a true, objective, universally valid standard of reasonable or just conduct. From this essentially nihilistic starting point, the Court helped to fashion a new post-Enlightenment paradigm under which the function of an administrative bureaucracy such as the ICC is to impose order on a market consisting of individuals pursuing their non-rational interests and preferences in the absence of an objective, shared moral framework. The Court thus gave its imprimatur to what has become our way of understanding who and what we are, namely, individuals who require bureaucratic supervision and bureaucratically imposed order as we pursue our non-rational wants and needs in market-based interactions with other individuals. Our need for some kind of order is the sole rationale for this bureaucratically imposed order because, by hypothesis, there no longer exists a true, objective, universally valid standard against which any such order can be measured. This Article\u27s account of the post-Enlightenment paradigm, its genesis, and its implications builds on the work of philosopher and social theorist Alasdair MacIntyre as well as on two recent publications by the author examining the intellectual framework underlying U.S. and European Internet privacy regulation