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The acclaimed Rappaport Center for Law & Public Policy provides educational programs, career mentoring, and financial support to law students interested in government and public policy. Visit http://www.bc.edu/rappaport for more information.

I have taught Health Law for almost three decades. In the early years, the course was primarily about private law, the application of contract and tort principles in the context of health insurance coverage and medical care. Federal law of Medicare, Medicaid, EMTALA, and federal civil rights laws always made an appearance. Other federal statutes were added as they came along: HIPAA, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and GINA. Over the years, the course focused more and more on federal statutes until the passage of the Affordable Care Act ("ACA") in 2010 completed the transition Health law is now a public law course.1 It focuses on federal statutes, and students need to understand the role of Congress, federal agencies, the states, and federal courts. The course explores myriad forms of federalism including Medicaid's cooperative federalism, the ACA's "fall back" federalism where the federal government steps in only if the states opt out, and old-fashioned federal law preemption of state law. Health law is now statutory interpretation and administrative law principles in the context of health insurance coverage and health care. Health law continues to be applied law: public law that affects health, health insurance, health care, and public health. About a third to a half of my health law course is devoted to providing students with a better understanding of medical decision making, the organization of health care delivery system, insurance theory, health disparities, and the social determinants of health— how where we live, work, play, and pray impact health Most importantly, Health Law remains a powerful lens through which to explore issues of social justice, social welfare, and law. We all get sick and need medical care. Many of my students and their families have had serious health problems and struggled to access medical care. Some have been bankrupted financially because of the costs of medical care. They know something about health and health care. This course is an opportunity to explore what equity, fairness, and justice mean when we talk about health and healthcare.

This article reviews the significant developments in the area of public utility law between January 1996 and August 1997. The first section covers legislative changes affecting electric, gas, telephone, and other public utilities; the second section reviews administrative action taken by the Virginia State Corporation Commission; and the third section addresses judicial action applied to the regulation of public utilities. The purposes of this article are to.provide Virginia public utility practitioners an overview of the recent developments in public utility law and to explain the impact these developments have upon public utilities operating in Virginia. This article, however, does not discuss or review all new developments related to Virginia public utility law.

From its birth, administrative law has claimed a close connection to governmental practice. Yet as administrative law has grown and matured it has moved further away from how agencies actually function. The causes of administrative law's disconnect from actual administration are complex and the divide is now longstanding, but it is also a source of concern given the increasing importance of internal administration for ensuring accountable government. This Article analyzes the contemporary manifestations and historical origins of administrative law's divide from public administration, as well as the growing costs of this disconnect. It also describes the Administrative Conference of the United States ("ACUS")'s exceptional status as the rare forum spanning the worlds of both administrative law and public administration, and the critical role ACUS can play in reasserting linkages between these two critical dimensions of government.

Includes index. ; Title on spine: Law and opinion in England. ; Includes bibliographical references. ; Relation between law and public opinion -- Characteristics of law-making opinion in England -- Democracy and legislation -- The three main currents of public opinion -- The period of Old Toryism or legislative quiescence -- The period of Benthamism or individualism -- The growth of collectivism -- Period of collectivism -- The debt of collectivism to Benthamism -- Counter-currents and cross-currents of legislative opinion -- Judicial legislation -- Relation between legislative opinion and general public opinion -- Appendix: I. The right of association. II. The Ecclesiastical commission. III. University tests. IV. Judge-made law. V. Proposed collectivist legislation of 1905. ; Mode of access: Internet.

"1st edition 1905 . reprinted . 1924." ; Relation between law and public opinion.--Characteristics of law-making opinion in England.--Democracy and legislation.--The three main currents of public opinion.--The period of old Toryism or legislative quiescence.--The period of Benthamism or individualism.--The growth of collectivism.--Period of collectivism.--The debt of collectivism to Benthamism.--Counter-currents and cross-currents of legislative opinion.--Judicial legislation.--Relation between legislative opinion and general public opinion.--Appendix: I. the right of association. II. The Ecclesiastical commission. III. University tests. IV. Judge-made law. ; Mode of access: Internet.

The legal position of public sector employees who challenge employment decisions taken by the state or organs of state in its/their capacity as employer in South Africa has long been problematic. Even though at least four judgments by the Constitutional Court of South Africa have considered whether employment-related decisions in the public sector domain do or could amount to administrative action and whether administrative law and/or labour law should be applicable for purposes of dispute resolution, legal uncertainty remains the order of the day due to a combination of factors. The authors assess whether (and to what extent) the rich South African administrative-law jurisprudence remains of importance in relation to the public employment relationship, bearing in mind the applicable legal considerations, including the inter-relatedness, interdependence and indivisibility of the range of applicable fundamental constitutional rights. Considering the debate in other jurisdictions on this issue, the authors develop a paradigm for situating different employment-related disputes as matters to be decided on labour and/or administrative-law principles in South Africa. This requires an appreciation, to the extent relevant, of the unique nature public sector employment relationships and a detailed investigation of the applicable legal sources and precise parameters of the cases already decided in the country. The position of employees deliberately excluded from the scope of labour legislation is analysed, for example, as is the legal position of high-ranking public sector employees. The outcome of the investigation is important for determining the legal principles to be applied in cases involving public sector employees in their employment relationship, and for purposes of determining the question of jurisdiction. Recent cases, for example where the courts have permitted the state, as employer, to review its own disciplinary decision (via a state-appointed chairperson of a disciplinary hearing) on the basis that this amounts to administrative action which is reviewable, are also examined in the light of the uncertainty regarding the precise nature and scope of the review.

It is conventionally assumed that administrative discretionary decisions are determined by political and expert-driven considerations and that law's structuring and constraining capacity in that regard is and should be limited. Law defines a space within which discretionary choices are irrelevant to law because they have the same legal value. These tenets have shaped both the ways the Court of Justice of the European Union has approached judicial review of discretion and, more generally, the way law is perceived to structure administrative discretion in the Member States and also in the EU. However, the recent expansion of the regulatory powers of the European Union justifies revisiting these basic axioms. In particular, how far should discretion be shielded from the values that EU law conveys? This paper proposes a normative elaboration of a core idea of public law to stress that law twins administrative discretion with a duty of regard to pre-determined public interests. On this basis, legal rules are able to provide a yardstick of critique of decisions that administrative officials adopt within spaces of discretion. An analysis of the Meroni judgment shows how this argument applies to EU law. But this claim only prepares the ground for a more complex inquiry: How does law operate – and how should it operate – within the spaces of administrative discretion, and how should courts review discretionary decisions? Administrative decision-makers construct the law in a specific institutional context in view of their specific tasks. Arguably, one should understand the specific processes through which they interpret the law to know how law may provide substantive criteria that guide discretionary choices. Such understanding would also be the basis to define and assess suitable degrees of judicial review of administrative discretion. One could then make a critical assessment – difficult to make at present – of the shifting boundaries between spaces of discretion and of judicial review that the dictum "manifest error of assessment, misuse of power or excess of power" conceals. This latter argument draws on the debate among US administrative law scholars on agency interpretation of statutes, but it is also mindful of conceptual distinctions that have prevailed in legal scholarship in Europe. The paper defines the prolegomena of a normative framework of a broader research project. It is work in progress.

Following the adoption of the Anti-Monopoly Law (AML) in 2007, China established a public enforcement regime that has three equal-ranking authorities. The legislative history of the AML suggests that this was a backward-looking compromise reached between the three central administrative agencies (the Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM), the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), and the State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC)), instead of a forward-looking design choice. This article focuses on the jurisdictional delimitation between the NDRC and the SAIC, a delimitation assigning the enforcement responsibilities based on whether an allegedly anticompetitive conduct is price related or not. This article first describes the jurisdictional delimitation as defined in the relevant legal documents. On that basis, it examines the legal and the economic rationales behind this delimitation. Subsequently, this article investigates to what extent this delimitation has been adhered to in practice, and there it identifies three problematic scenarios, which indicate the inevitability of the two agencies overstepping their respective authority in practice. This article finds that this delimitation is likely to induce the following problems: uncertainty on supplementary enforcement and follow-on civil actions, uncontrolled agency discretion, and distortive theories of harm. Therefore, it suggests that this jurisdictional delimitation should be removed.

This article explains, at a high level, some of the major changes to electric regulation in Virginia in recent years. It also discusses how the General Assembly's new policies have affected retail electric rates and the development of new generation facilities, including renewable energy resources, in the Commonwealth since 1999.

Financial and legal constraints on nonprofit public interest organizations have focused attention on possibilities for pursuing public interest goals from within market-driven private practice. In this context, the private public interest law firm has been held out as an alternative site for "doing well" and "doing good," allowing lawyers to take on large-scale social change litigation that nonprofit groups cannot because of resource limits—and big-firm pro bono programs will not because of business conflicts—while also addressing other deficits associated with nonprofit practice, such as low salaries, lack of training, and high turnover. Yet there is little research on how such firms operationalize their conception of public interest advocacy and what tradeoffs are required by the need to generate attorney's fees. This Article examines these tradeoffs through a case study of a nationally prominent private public interest law firm, Hadsell & Stormer, which is located in the Los Angeles area. It focuses on how the relationship between Hadsell & Stormer's private form and public mission plays out across three key axes: principle (how the lawyers understand their obligations to causes, clients, and communities); power (how the lawyers make decisions about firm governance); and profit (how the lawyers build case portfolios, staff matters, and co-counsel with other firms). Across each dimension, we see that the firm's hybrid form (part public, part private) is reflected in a set of hybrid ideals and practices (neither entirely public-oriented nor market-driven), which are continuously negotiated by the lawyers. I make three general observations based on the data. First, Hadsell & Stormer's effort to merge profit and principle results in a distinctive notion of professionalism, in which broad obligations to society, such as pro bono service, are generally viewed as inconsistent with firm radicalism, while micro-obligations to clients, such as zealousness, are embraced as part of the firm's commitment to litigation excellence. Lawyer autonomy in defining organizational culture and selecting cases is highly valued, which (in combination with the firm's strong client-centered ethos) results in a relatively weak sense of firm accountability to a well-defined external political constituency. Second, with respect to internal power relations, Hadsell & Stormer works to balance its commitment to egalitarian values—creating an internal firm culture that matches its vision of the outside world—with the reality of running a financially viable firm built upon litigation success. In general, firm governance tends to track the public-private divide, with broad decisions relating to firm politics, such as whether to pursue new categories of cases for political impact, made in accord with democratic ideals, and specific questions relating to firm economics, such as staffing and case management, made in a more hierarchical manner. Finally, although Hadsell & Stormer is categorically not driven by profit, it must make one in order to survive. To do so, the firm deploys three main strategies. (1) It spreads risk through case selection by (a) choosing cases across different categories based on double-bottom line considerations, and (b) cross-subsidizing high-risk "righteous" cases with lower-risk, higher-yield "bread and butter" cases and, less frequently, non-PIL cases that can be quickly resolved for predictable fees. (2) It increases productivity and spreads risk through case staffing, by (a) leveraging associate work in a conventional pyramid pattern, and (b) entering into flexible collaborations with other firms that allow it to expand or contract based on the volume of work. (3) It hedges downside risk through fee arrangements that allow it to profit from its comparative expertise (trial work) and recover irrespective of the award of statutory fees; the firm also over-selects damages cases relative to injunctive relief cases, which pose greater risks of no fee recovery. In the end, I conclude that firms like Hadsell & Stormer play a unique role in the broader public interest law field. They are optimally suited to complement their nonprofit counterparts by bringing more legal muscle to bear and filling in substantive gaps in the system of legal representation. They therefore achieve a central aim of the public interest law movement: giving voice to less powerful groups. In this sense, although private PIL firms may not provide more justice in the aggregate, they provide justice when it counts.

At head of title: 96th Congress, 1st session. Committee print. ; Mode of access: Internet.

Includes legislation. ; Includes bibliographical references. ; Mode of access: Internet.

Public interest law has become increasingly globalized in the post-Cold War era, incorporated in national legal systems across the developing world, and deployed in transnational activist campaigns advancing social justice causes. This essay--the introduction to a symposium on public interest law across borders--examines the structural factors shaping the global trajectory of public interest law and offers a preliminary appraisal of its emerging global role. In Part I, we trace the historical movement of public interest law from an insular American project toward a more globalized set of practices and concepts. We suggest two reasons for this shift. The first is the ascendance of the Rule-of-Law movement, sponsored by international financial institutions and donor agencies, which has promoted public interest law around the world as a crucial component of good governance built upon a foundation of rights enforcement and political accountability. Against this backdrop, local activists, particularly in post-authoritarian countries, have turned to public interest law as a way to achieve the promise of new democratic orders while accessing crucial funding support. Second, the institutional framework of global governance has drawn public interest law into the contest over the impact of open markets and the power of human rights at the supranational level. Transnational activist networks have mobilized public interest law in efforts to hold international finance and trade institutions accountable for their distributional impacts, challenge the deregulation of global markets through multi-level advocacy efforts, and leverage the power of the human rights system to strengthen domestic social justice movements and build transnational solidarity. Part II explores the implications of these trends, suggesting that they point toward two evolving conceptions of public interest law: as a global institution and a technique of global governance. With respect to public interest law's institutionalization in developing countries, we outline the factors shaping its distinctively hybrid form, which incorporates elements imported by global sponsors, while building upon indigenous traditions and adapting to opportunities afforded by national structures. As a tool of global governance, we suggest that public interest law is associated with a broad range of problem solving practices targeted to the transnational context. We conclude by offering a provisional map of the new terrain of this transnational advocacy, highlighting the global arenas in which it operates, the strategies it deploys, and the networks it constructs.

In his important and provocative Foreword, Professor Daryl Levinson criticizes American constitutional law for failing to attend sufficiently to questions of power, which he defines as "the ability to effect substantive policy outcomes by influencing what the government will or will not do." As Levinson details, structural constitutional law has focused on how power is distributed among governmental institutions. It has not consistently or adequately considered how power is – or should be – distributed among social groups. Ultimately, Levinson suggests that the narrow focus of separation of powers law and theory on "equalizing the power of government institutions" lacks normative force. Equalizing power among interests and groups in society is a more worthwhile project than checking, balancing, and equalizing power among governmental institutions. In the latter, he concludes, "it is hard to see any spark."