Thirty feet above the marble entrance to the Supreme Court looms the Great American Promise: “Equal Justice Under Law.” Chiseled by hand before the building was completed in 1935, the bold pledge—though etched in stone—remains distant and unfulfilled in neighborhoods just a few miles away. Burdened with poverty and a lack of resources—access to technology and easy transportation, first and foremost—the less fortunate have long found equal justice mostly out of reach. COVID-19 has only increased the problem, isolating needy Americans in their most desperate time. Yet as you drive into any rural area of America, you find that the virus also revealed what has already proven to be one of the great equalizers of our age: technology. It’s making a profound difference and traveling across America makes that clear.
Continue reading “Witnessed From the Justice Bus: COVID Drove Equal Justice Off the Road, but Technology Grabbed the Wheel and Is Steering Us Into the Future”Tag: COVID-19
Can Employers Mandate the COVID Vaccine?: Assessing the Implications of Emergency Use Authorization
Isaac Mamaysky is a Partner in the national Employment Law and Human Resources practice of Potomac Law Group PLLC. He is also an adjunct professor of law at Albany Law School, where he teaches at the intersection of employment law, management, and human resources.
Continue reading “Can Employers Mandate the COVID Vaccine?: Assessing the Implications of Emergency Use Authorization”Navigating the Legal Challenges of COVID-19 Vaccine Policies in Private Employment: School Vaccination Laws Provide a Roadmap
COVID-19 created unprecedented challenges for private employers in the United States. Employers—many of whom were technologically unprepared—were forced to rapidly adapt from their on-site operations to a virtual environment supported by fully-remote employees. That, in addition to staying abreast of ever-evolving executive orders, new legislation and regulations, COVID-19 guidelines from federal and state public health officials, and straining to provide a host of flexible accommodations to employees with concerns about workplace safety and exposure to COVID-19. With several COVID-19 vaccines now available to the public, many of these challenges may soon be in the rearview. At least the hope is that continued distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine to the public at-large will bring herd-immunity and a return of normalcy to the American workplace.
Continue reading “Navigating the Legal Challenges of COVID-19 Vaccine Policies in Private Employment: School Vaccination Laws Provide a Roadmap”Channel Your Inner Kindergartner: Fostering a Culture Conducive to Creativity in Legal Practice
The COVID-19 pandemic requires lawyers to address a myriad of unique problems—and highlights the need for lawyers to engage as creative problem solvers. Lawyers must determine how best to deliver legal services while contending with travel restrictions, social distancing, stay-in-place measures, and business and court closures. Furthermore, questions arise as to how to tackle the access to justice gap in the midst of the largest global recession since the Great Depression.
Although lawyers need to work collaboratively to come up with creative solutions to these unprecedented problems, a challenge administered to groups of business students, lawyers, CEOs, engineers, and kindergartners revealed that lawyers do not work efficiently and effectively to creatively solve problems. In dozens of challenges, kindergartners outperformed all of the other groups. Instead of collaborating and focusing on completing the task, the lawyers engaged in status management—trying to determine how they fit into the group and who was in charge. While not smarter than the lawyers, the kindergarteners solved the problems best because they were smarter in the way that they worked with each other.
Continue reading “Channel Your Inner Kindergartner: Fostering a Culture Conducive to Creativity in Legal Practice”Online Dispute Resolution: Mediating in the Time of COVID-19
By Adrienne Baker
It has been one year since our law school transitioned entirely online. The phrases “novel coronavirus” and “social distancing,” once peculiar word pairings, quickly became ubiquitous, upending our expectations for the foreseeable future. However, it’s clear that COVID-19 has catapulted Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) into the spotlight. In this universally stressful year, there is great promise for online mediation.
Continue reading “Online Dispute Resolution: Mediating in the Time of COVID-19”Emerging Themes from the Healthy Food Policy Project’s COVID-19 Food Access Municipal Policy Index
By Rachel Lantz, with support from other contributors to the Healthy Food Policy Project (HFPP), including Amanda Karls, Claire Child, Lihlani Nelson, Rebecca Hare, Sally Mancini, and Whitney Shields. HFPP is a collaboration between the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law Schools (CAFS), the Public Health Law Center (PHLC) at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, and the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at the University of Connecticut. HFPP is funded by the National Agricultural Library, Agricultural Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Continue reading “Emerging Themes from the Healthy Food Policy Project’s COVID-19 Food Access Municipal Policy Index”Covid-19, Abortion, and Public Health in the Culture Wars
When I was asked to write an article on the restrictions that some states sought to impose on abortion access during the Covid-19 pandemic, my initial thought was that the topic would probably be stale before I finished writing the piece. The worry was misplaced. On the one hand, all the restrictions put in place shortly after the pandemic began either expired or were defeated before the summer of 2020—long before the publication of this article. But attempts to restrict access to abortion in the United States are evergreen. The topic is continually relevant.
Continue reading “Covid-19, Abortion, and Public Health in the Culture Wars”Estate Planning During COVID-19: Easing Will Formalities to Allow Virtual Execution
By Bailey D. Barnes.
Barnes is a second-year student at The University of Tennessee College of Law where he serves as Managing Editor of the Tennessee Law Review. Prior to law school, Mr. Barnes earned a master’s degree in United States History.
Continue reading “Estate Planning During COVID-19: Easing Will Formalities to Allow Virtual Execution”