Many states and localities have adopted salary history bans in recent years. The goal of these bans is to stop the use of a worker's past salary to help formulate a starting salary for that worker at a new workplace. Advocates of the bans strive to diminish gender discrimination in the workplace and in particular to reduce the gender pay gap. The theory behind the ban is that on average women have a weaker salary history than men in part because of discrimination, and the use of salary histor...| Scholarly Commons at Boston University School of Law
Researchers have shown that physicians’ fear of providing abortion care that runs afoul of these laws is high, even when following the standard of medical care for preserving a patient’s life.5 Yet, despite threats of criminal penalties and the uncertainty and moral distress that has come with confusing wording and variation among state laws, the national number of abortions has not declined after Dobbs. On the contrary, people are still seeking abortions, clinicians are performing aborti...| Scholarly Commons at Boston University School of Law
On February 28, 2025, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced a significant departure in how it will interact with its key stakeholders, which include physicians, health care organizations, and patients in public programs like Medicaid. Specifically, HHS will no longer provide an opportunity for public comments on many actions around contracts, grants, and benefits.1 Additionally, it will not engage in public comments when it decides there is “good cause” to bypass ...| Scholarly Commons at Boston University School of Law
The Supreme Court is poised to place new limits on Congress’s spending power at the urging of states vying for regulatory dominance, particularly in health care and public health. This article is the first to highlight and catalog the throughlines of argumentation, which sparked after states successfully challenged the ACA but have grown into opposing more than Medicaid’s cooperative federalism. This means federal and state programs that heavily rely on federal spending power are at risk,...| Scholarly Commons at Boston University School of Law
Issues of scale—the relationship between the amount of an activity and its associated costs and benefits—permeate discussions around law and technologies. Indeed, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that scale is the reason for most technology regulation. But it’s not always clear how lawmakers and judges conceptualize “scale” when approaching questions around automated technologies. Scale is often used intuitively, just to mean “more.” But scale is not always just about m...| Scholarly Commons at Boston University School of Law
Global tax policy has long determined which states can access the resources necessary to flourish. Today, even the wealthiest states struggle to tax rich individuals and multinationals. Anti-Black racism has enriched affluent states at the expense of marginalized ones and undermined the taxing power of all nations. In a compelling narrative interwoven with personal storytelling, Racial Capitalism and International Tax Law: The Story of Global Jim Crow connects Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s met...| Scholarly Commons at Boston University School of Law
In the first U.S. Supreme Court case involving access to abortion after the 2024 election, a 6-3 majority allowed states to block Medicaid patients from choosing their own health care provider. Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic involved a diabetic Medicaid patient seeking comprehensive health care at Planned Parenthood South Atlantic (PPSA). In 2018, South Carolina blocked PPSA from Medicaid unless it would agree not to provide any abortions. Under federal law, Medicaid already only...| Scholarly Commons at Boston University School of Law
| Scholarly Commons at Boston University School of Law
This Article analyzes the largely unexplored phenomenon of militant civilians engaged in efforts to police and silence activism that challenges entrenched American power systems and economic distributions placing whites atop the social hierarchy in the United States. I argue that this civilian enforcement is an unregulated vessel for state-sponsored violence meant to silence the contestation of the existing racial hierarchy. While scholars, myself included, have written about the many ways po...| Scholarly Commons at Boston University School of Law
This article first describes shifts in human rights law that have led to improvements in the realization of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) over the last decade. The article does so, however, with careful attention to the structural factors beyond formal legal mechanisms that may undermine the ability of governments, even with the best of intentions, to fully develop the necessary robust health and justice systems. Second, this article considers two additional factors: the po...| Scholarly Commons at Boston University School of Law
The article discusses the potential risks faced by young people if the US Supreme Court upholds state bans on gender-affirming care, focusing on Tennessee's complete ban on such care. It highlights the medical risks and harms associated with these bans, arguing that they may violate the equal-protection doctrine of the Constitution by discriminating based on sex. The article emphasizes the importance of preserving gender-affirming care for positive health outcomes and warns against the potent...| Scholarly Commons at Boston University School of Law
In this roundtable discussion, Savannah Cox speaks with three experts about the financialization of climate risk governance: Kelly Hereid, a climate scientist at Liberty Mutual, Madison Condon, an associate professor at Boston University School of Law, and Emma Colven, a lecturer in risk, environment, and society at King’s College London. In this conversation that ranges from Miami to Jakarta, Savannah, Kelly, Madison, and Emma discuss the legal, political, and technical challenges relating...| Scholarly Commons at Boston University School of Law
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 cu...| Scholarly Commons at Boston University School of Law
Lawmakers have started to regulate “dark patterns,” understood to be design practices meant to influence technology users’ decisions through manipulative or deceptive means. Most agree that dark patterns are undesirable, but open questions remain as to which design choices should be subjected to scrutiny, much less the best way to regulate them. In this Article, we propose adapting the concept of dark patterns to better fit legal frameworks. Critics allege that the legal conceptualizati...| Scholarly Commons at Boston University School of Law
Background Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) poses an important global health challenge, including insufficient investment in research and development. This study quantifies the required “fair share” contributions from the G7+EU27 countries for an effective set of pull incentives for antibacterial research and development. Methods Fair share targets within the G7+EU27 were calculated from GDP data and revenue targets from the literature, adjusted for inflation. Cefiderocol and ceftazidime-av...| Scholarly Commons at Boston University School of Law
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 i...| Scholarly Commons at Boston University School of Law
These remarks address the topic of “simple competition policy for a complex world”.[1] There is much to be said in favor of simplicity in legal rules. Complex legal rules are often difficult for the individuals who must comply with the rules to understand what they mean. Complex rules are often confusing, and take a long time to understand, when in the real business world decisions must be made quickly – at the pace at which business occurs. Businessmen do not have the luxury that acade...| Scholarly Commons at Boston University School of Law
Incentives for individuals to save for retirement currently total 1.5% of US GDP. For that substantial investment, we get a system that actually deepens wealth inequality. The top 10% of earners capture 60% of the associated tax benefits, and employer matching contributions disproportionately favor the highest earners. Although defined contribution plans have long been subject to non-discrimination requirements aimed at ensuring that benefits do not accrue predominantly to the wealthiest part...| Scholarly Commons at Boston University School of Law
Chief Justice Roberts of the United States Supreme Court has said that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”1 In this Article, I examine what it means to discriminate on the basis of race—or what it means to stop discriminating on the basis of race. I consider interventions designed to enhance social welfare in an economy with racially discriminatory games operating at its base. One set of interventions is color-blind, in t...| Scholarly Commons at Boston University School of Law
This wheel is based on the Article, "Digital Servitude", forthcoming in the Boston College Law Review.| Scholarly Commons at Boston University School of Law
This repository contains scholarly works from the Boston University School of Law. Here you will find faculty scholarship, books, collections, and photo galleries.| scholarship.law.bu.edu
Calls for breaking up monopolies—especially Amazon, Facebook, and Google—have largely focused on proving that past acquisitions of companies like Whole Foods, Instagram, and YouTube were anticompetitive. But scholars have paid insufficient attention to another major obstacle that also explains why the government in recent decades has not broken up a single large company. After establishing that an anticompetitive merger or other act has occurred, there is great skepticism of breakups as a...| Scholarly Commons at Boston University School of Law