Hydraulic Fracturing in North Carolina: How It Came to Be,and What It Means for Our State

This article details the process of legalizing hydraulic fracturing in North Carolina, which began with a request by the North Carolina Congress for a study of implementation strategies and geologic concerns from the state's environmental agencies. Steadily afterwards several pieces of legislation were introduced to create a regulatory scheme to encompass the issuing of drilling permits, regulating operations, and protecting surrounding groundwater. This article illustrates the legislative history, highlighting key components. Lastly, two recent studies regarding groundwater safety around hydraulic fracturing sites are explored in order to gain a brief understanding of the scientific consensus of the process.     

Law's Allure in American Politics and Policy: What It Is,What It Is Not,and What It Might Yet Be

Responding to a set of review essays, the author of Law's Allure: How Law Shapes, Constrains, Saves, and Kills Politics ( Silverstein 2009 ) argues that politicians and policy entrepreneurs fail to calculate the risks of juridification—the judicialization of policy combined with the legalization of politics itself—which have expanded and accelerated in the United States in recent decades. Paradigmatic case studies (on subjects including poverty, electoral districting, automated budgeting, war powers, abortion laws, and the regulation of tobacco as well as the environment) illustrate the risks of various patterns of juridification and construct an agenda for future research.     

Ethics, Information Technology, and Public Health: New Challenges for the Clinician-Patient Relationship

Increasingly widespread adoption of health information technology tools in clinical care increases interest in ethical and legal issues related to the use of these tools for public health and the effects of these uses on the clinician-patient relationship. It is argued that patients, clinicians, and society have generally uncontroversial duties to support civil society's public health mission, information technology supports this mission, and the effects of automated and computerized public health surveillance are likely to have little if any effect on the clinician-patient relationship. It is also suggested, nevertheless, that electronic public health surveillance raises interesting and important ethical issues, some of which can be addressed if not resolved by empirical research, especially regarding patient preferences about secondary use of health data and their moral obligation to contribute to population- based health.     

什么是法学家的社会责任?

本文从法学家的社会责任着手,集中阐述了法学家社会责任的意义,作者认为,法学家作为以从事法学研究为职业的知识分子,应当尽可能为国家、社会的发展提供所需要的法学智力成果,从而为推进中国法治建设作出贡献.由于法学家是通过自己的学术研究成果来实现这些社会责任的,为此,法学家应当努力推出创造性的学术成果,也应当提倡勤奋治学、辛勤耕耘的科研精神.     

Labor Turnover and Legal Means of Combatting It

Under the conditions of socialism and the building of communism, labor turnover is not an inevitable accompaniment of production. On the contrary, it is fundamentally foreign to the planned nature of the socialist economy. Being a variety of undesirable flow of personnel, labor turnover interferes with the carrying out of planned allocation of the labor force and brings disproportions into the geographic distribution of production and the development of the national economy. It has a negative effect on most of the principal indicators of production. It causes a drop in the quality of output, increases costs, interferes with the smooth rhythm of production processes, dissipates job experience and skills, and impairs labor discipline. It has been calculated that the losses to the economy caused by labor turnover comprise about three billion rubles each year.     

Transforming Public Health Law: The Turning Point Model State Public Health Act

Law is an essential tool for improving public health infrastructure and outcomes; however, existing state statutory public health laws may be insufficient. Built over decades in response to various diseases/conditions, public health laws are antiquated, divergent, and confusing. The Turning Point Public Health Statute Modernization National Collaborative addressed the need for public health law reform by producing a comprehensive model state act. The Act provides scientifically, ethically, and legally sound provisions on public health infrastructure, powers, duties, and practice. This article examines (1) how statutory law can be a tool for improving the public's health, (2) existing needs for public health law reform, (3) themes and provisions of the Turning Point Act, and (4) how it is being used by public health practitioners.     

The New International Health Regulations: An Historic Development for International Law and Public Health

The adoption of the new International Health Regulations (IHR) in May 2005 represents an historic development for international law and public health. This article describes the IHR revision process and analyzes why the new IHR constitute an advance in global health governance.     

Punishment Drift: The Spread of Penal Harm and What We Should Do About It

It is well documented that the effects of legal punishment tend to drift to the family members, friends, and larger communities of convicted offenders. Instead of conceiving of punishment drift as incidental to legal punishment, or as merely foreseen but not intended by state authorities and thus permissible, I argue that efforts ought to be undertaken to limit or ameliorate it. Failure to confine punishment drift comes perilously close to punishment of the innocent and is at odds with other legal doctrines and broader penal practices that hold offenders, and offenders alone, responsible for their crimes. Numerous arguments urging tolerance of punishment drift, or more assertively defending it, are examined and found wanting.