By: Paula Whitacre, Steven Kendall, and Anne-Marie Mazza

The COVID-19 pandemic raised challenging legal and policy issues—as reflected in numerous, often inconsistent, health-related decisions made in the United States at the national, state, and local level and in COVID-related judicial opinions issued after the onset of the pandemic. The response to the pandemic provides an opportunity to consider whether federal, state, and local governments had the necessary authority to deal with the crisis, how authority was applied, whether there was sufficient clarity as to responsibility, and what should be changed for the future.

On May 30–31, 2024, an ad hoc committee under the auspices of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Committee on Science, Technology, and Law (CSTL) convened a virtual workshop to examine the allocation of responsibility among levels of government when dealing with a public health crisis; the extent to which federal, state, and local governments have the necessary authority to act; whether there is sufficient clarity as to which levels of government are responsible for particular actions; and lessons that can be learned from the pandemic to inform government responses to pandemics in the future.

The National Academies Press 2024

By: Timothy R. Wyatt and Conner Gwyn Schenck

Background

State departments of transportation have a continuing need to keep abreast of operating practices and legal elements of specific problems in highway law. The NCHRP Legal Research Digest and the Selected Studies in Transportation Law (SSTL) series are intended to keep departments up-to-date on laws that will affect their operations.

Foreword

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many transportation departments and authorities, their contractors, and consultants looked to the force majeure provisions of their contracts to determine what conditions or terms would govern their performances, what risks and obligations would be upheld, and what potential waivers would apply.

NCHRP LRD 93: Pandemics and Contractual Issues addresses the legal impacts that transportation agencies can expect to have as a result of an unusual occurrence when the nature of the occurrence (e.g., a pandemic) is not explicitly identified in contractual force majeure provisions, and the sufficiency or reasonableness of consequences for noncompliance with contract performance levels and with risk transfers.

This digest focuses on typical force majeure provisions and conditions in transportation construction, maintenance, or toll road operation contracts. It also addresses the legal aspects of government-mandated and imposed quarantine and business disruptions caused by the 2020-21 COVID-19 pandemic.

The digest provides a review of:

• Applicable force majeure clauses and the key criteria and circumstances weighed in favor of the conclusion that force majeure applies;

• How performance, time of completion, and financial provisions in the contracts affected the transportation agency and the contractor;

• The defenses or remedies a transportation agency could assert to counter the claim of force majeure legal arguments to make in support of the declaration of force majeure; and

• How the cost of shortfalls is allocated to each side without the force majeure clause.

This digest will be helpful to all involved in the legal obligations of parties to contracts concerning force majeure impacted by pandemics and other unanticipated occurrences, including attorneys representing transportation departments and authorities, their contractors and consultants, policymakers, local, state, and federal personnel, transportation practitioners, decision-makers, and stakeholders.

The National Academies Press 2024

By Julie Gerlinger

The author investigates the impact of law-and-order schools, defined as those that rely heavily on exclusionary discipline (i.e., suspension and expulsion) as a form of punishment, on neighborhood crime. Additional analyses are performed to assess whether the effects of punitive school discipline on local crime are moderated by neighborhood disadvantage. Findings suggest that suspensions are associated with increases in local crime—evidence of a macro-level school-to-prison pipeline—while expulsions are generally associated with fewer crime incidents. Although disciplinary exclusions appear to increase crime at fairly consistent rates across levels of neighborhood disadvantage, both exclusion types are associated with more aggravated assault in areas with higher levels of disadvantage. As such, institutional processes of the school appear to help explain variations in community crime.

Socius Volume 6, January-December 2020

By Hannabeth Franchino-Olsen  , Brittney Chesworth 

This document review investigated policies that govern Batterer Intervention Programs (BIPs) across the United States. The document review systematically analyzed current state practice standards (n = 46) across the United States that guide BIPs. Data collection and abstraction took place between June of 2019 and January of 2020. Descriptive statistics were calculated for standard development and revision processes, BIP oversight, and requirements for program structure and curriculum. This review revealed key findings about standard requirements, including: (a) most do not cite research as having informed their development; (b) most have been revised in the past decade; (c) state agencies involved in BIP oversight are typically social or health agencies or a judicial board; (d) most require BIPs to provide intakes, group education, gender-exclusive groups, two facilitators and to cover a variety of topics; (e) most do not require individualized treatment or program evaluation. Additional findings around program structure, intake and assessment, and curriculum and intervention requirements are explored. Collectively, standards not changed much in the last decade and often standards do not reflect the latest research on IPV perpetration. Multidisciplinary teams, including researchers familiar with the IPV literature, should work collaboratively to revise standards based on best practices.  

Aggression and Violent Behavior Volume 77, July–August 2024, 101941

By Matteo Tiratelli

This paper assembles the largest set of British survey questions about criminal justice to date (1,190 question-year pairs) and uses it to measure crime concern, punitiveness, support for the death penalty, and the prioritization of crime as a social issue from the 1960s to today. Results lend some support to existing narratives of public opinion, showing that concern and prioritization grew steadily through the 1970s before declining from the mid-2000s, and that support for the death penalty has been falling since at least the 1960s. But they contradict orthodox accounts of the 1980s as a period of rising punitiveness, showing instead that support for tougher policing and sentencing was highly volatile and subject to significant demographic variation until the late 1990s. I also show that crime concern is particularly responsive to the true rate of crime and propose a model for the interaction between these different strands of public opinion.  

The British Journal of Criminology, azae058, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azae058, Published: 13 August 2024