Jane Bambauer

Professor of Law

Articles

• "Coronavirus Tracing Apps Are Being Tested Around the World, But Will Concerts Get Onboard?," Alexei Barrionuevo, Billboard, May 28, 2020: In this article, Barrionuevo reports on the impact that coronavirus contact tracing apps may have on "restoring confidence to nightclub and festival attendees amid spotty testing, privacy concerns and still-emerging medical information about the virus." This article features Professor Bambauer who says, on the subject of the legality of mandating health-data tracking apps, “The law can certainly permit some kind of surveillance under these types of emergency conditions, especially when we’re in a position like we are now, where the alternatives to very invasive monitoring are equally repugnant and stifling of our rights.”
• "How to Defend Yourself from COVID-19 Myths and Lies," Daniel Stolte-Arizona, Futurity, May 11, 2020: In this article, Stolte-Arizona interviews UArizona experts about their thoughts on misinformation about COVID-19 including "Jane Bambauer, a professor at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law, who is studying why the COVID-19 crisis is particularly suited to breeding bad information." 
• "It's Time to Get Real About COVID Apps," Fighting Covid with Data, May 14, 2020: This article examines the role that apps play in combating COVID-19. "Digital technologies can and should be an integral tool to magnify the benefits of ramped-up testing and manual contact tracing. Moreover, policymakers should start preparing for the rollout of a data-driven COVID response now. As was the case with lockdowns, delays will add to both the health and economic tolls."

Webinar

• "Wonder at Home: Technology and Your Privacy Rights in the COVID-19 Response," Panelists: Jane Bambauer (Professor of Law at the James E. Rogers College of Law) and Andrew Woods (Professor of Law at the James E. Rogers College of Law).

Stacy Butler

Professor of Practice

Program

• The Innovation for Justice Program is a social justice innovation lab that designs, builds and tests disruptive solutions to the justice gap. As one of ten legal innovation labs in the country, we are starting to hear from courts and legal service providers from across the U.S. who want our help. Our legal systems are grappling with the sudden and unexpected fact that they need to operate remotely and online: court forms and processes need to be automated, low-income community members need remote assistance, and creative thinkers and doers are in high demand. So we're forming Team i4J for students, faculty and staff who want to contribute their time and talent now and in the months to come.  

Join the Team i4J workspace here. 

If you're new to Slack, learn the basics here. 

News

• "'All Of Us Are Going To Feel The Impact': 40 Million Renters At Risk Of Eviction By Year's End," Steve Goldstein, KJZZ, August 14, 2020: "As the pandemic continues and millions of Americans are out of work because of it, concerns over a dramatic increase in evictions and homelessness have remained intense. Gov. [Doug] Ducey recently extended a moratorium on evictions, but [the week of Aug. 9], a lawsuit was filed  to overturn it with the argument that landlords have had some tenants who haven't had to pay their rent in months. New research says evictions could reach as high as 40 million by the end of this year if Congress doesn't act to extend other moratoriums and assist renters. Stacy Butler of the University of Arizona's Innovation for Justice Program was part of the research compiled by nine institutes and organizations. And she's with me. Stacy, the numbers indicate that Arizona's circumstances are consistent with the rest of the country's. So what would you like the federal government to do now to lessen the problem?"
• "Nearly 600 Facing Eviction in Pima County as Hearings Proceed Despite Pandemic," Jake Steinberg, Arizona Public Media, June 2, 2020: Steinberg reports that, despite the impact that  the COVID-19 pandemic is having on Pima County residents, evictions in Pima County will resume. Steinberg discussed the future impact on evicted citizens with Professor Butler who said, “Eviction judgments stay on your credit report for seven years. So even if you’re still staying in your home, they have other lasting financial harms and can make it hard for someone to rent another place in the future.”
• "Online Dispute Resolution's Role in a Post-Pandemic World," Maddie Hosack, LexBlog, June 10, 2020: In this blog post, Hosack discusses "how State and federal courts have worked overtime to implement video- and tele-conferencing, remote filing, and even remote jury trials in order to ensure due process" in order to operate online. Hosack goes on to highlight Professor Butler's opinions about the importance of user feedback to ODR design.



Andrew Coan 

Professor of Law; Director, William H. Rehnquist Center

on the Constitutional Structures of Government



“COVID-19 in No Man’s Land,” Andy Coan and David Schwartz (University of Wisconsin Law School): This forthcoming paper will explore the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for how we think about American federalism, in particular the principle that the federal government is one of limited and enumerated powers. 

Tessa L. Dysart 

Assistant Director of Legal Writing

& Associate Clinical Professor of Law

• "Moot Court in the Age of Coronavirus," Tessa L. Dysart, Appellant Advocacy Blog, March 23, 2020: "In the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak, Arizona Law decided to move [the] 2L/3L intramural moot court competition online." This blog post provides "tips for creating the competition and for running the rounds" on Zoom from the moot court competition.
• "Guest Post: Zoom Arguments - Zoom Arguments--A View from the Texas Supreme Court," Tessa L. Dysart, Appellant Advocacy Blog, April 13, 2020: "Justice Eva Guzman of the Texas Supreme Court has served on the Texas Supreme Court since 2009.  Her Court recently held Zoom oral arguments." In this blog post, she shares her "thoughts on the Zoom argument experience." 
• "My Final Thoughts on Moot Court in the Age of Coronavirus," Tessa L. Dysart, Appellant Advocacy Blog, April 27, 2020: Based on the two previous blog posts, "and a few other things I learned along the way," Dysart shares her "final thoughts and tips on virtual moot court competitions, in case we are all doing this again in the fall." 

​

Toni Massaro Regents Professor, Milton O. Riepe Chair in Constitutional Law, and Dean Emerita

• "Can Your Employer Require You to get the COVID-19 Vaccine?," Alexis Berdine, News 4, December 10, 2020: "It may not be a question of if you want to get the COVID-19 vaccine but instead if you want to keep your job. News 4 Tucson spoke with local employment lawyers who said in general, employers can require employees to get the vaccine.  

Note: See also the Toni Massaro, Justin Pidot & Marvin Slepian tab for more resources from Professor Massaro

Toni Massaro Regents Professor, Milton O. Riepe Chair in Constitutional Law, and Dean Emerita;

Justin Pidot Professor of Law, Co-director of the Environmental Law Program;

Marvin Slepian, MD, Regents' Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Engineering

Article

• "Constitutional Norms for Pandemic Policy," Arizona Legal Studies Discussion Paper No. 20-29: "The COVID-19 pandemic has unleashed a torrent of legal and political commentary, and rightly so: the disease touches every corner of life and implicates all areas of law. In response to the disease, governments, civic institutions, and businesses have struggled to protect public health, respect individual autonomy, and enable Americans to satisfy their elemental instinct to congregate with one another.
  Public perceptions about the disease, and our responses to it, have substantially fallen along predictable ideological lines. For example, the willingness of individuals to social distance may indicate something about their risk tolerance, but also about their political affiliation. Our ability to launch a unified response to COVID-19 has, in other words, been affected by rifts that generally infect American political life.
  How we manage these divides over pandemic response matters, because the costs of disunity are high. Those who fear the risk COVID-19 poses to their lives depend on others to participate in mitigation efforts; those who fear the risk our response to COVID-19 poses to their livelihoods depend on others to willingly reengage in economic life. Common ground, while elusive, is essential to America’s response to this pandemic, and the next one that will surely follow.
  We argue that ingredients for consensus already exist, even if they are obscured by political and policy rancor. Americans share the common goal to safely return to families, jobs, schools, places of assembly, pubs, parks, and the myriad of other settings that make up human lives and we share a fidelity to basic constitutional legal norms that can inform how we safely return.
  This Essay identifies four constitutional principles to shape pandemic policies and enable them to garner broad public acceptance: substantive and procedural rationality, respect of fundamental liberties, equal treatment, and flexibility to enable government to nimbly and effectively address emergencies that threaten life itself. Fidelity to these norms is essential for all institutions, public and private, because reopening safely can occur only through the cooperation of private individuals, and individuals will cooperate only if they have confidence in the ability of institutions to protect safety, liberty, and equality."

News

• “Constitution Has Answers for Balancing Health and Liberties Amid COVID-19, Experts Say,” Kyle Mittan, UA News, July 29, 2020: In this article, Mittan writes, "As COVID-19 affects every aspect of American life, it has also emerged as a politically polarizing issue, and measures to mitigate the disease's spread have brought about debates on balancing public health and civil liberty. Three University of Arizona experts weighed in on how norms and values defined in the U.S. Constitution could guide pandemic-related law and policy. A working draft of their essay was released on the Social Science Research Network in late June as part of Arizona Legal Studies, a series of working papers by faculty and students in the James E. Rogers College of Law."
• "Where the Constitution and COVID-19 Intersect," Christopher Conover, Arizona Public Media News, August 3, 2020: In this interview with Professor Massaro, Conover states, "Restrictions to fight the spread of COVID-19 have some people saying government has overstepped its bounds. A group of law professors has written an essay that says the highest law in the land defines the issue differently." 

Note: See also the Marvin Slepian, James Coan & Andrew Coan tab for more resources from Marvin Slepian and the Toni Massaro tab for more resources from Professor Massaro.

Shefali Milczarek-Desai 

Executive Director, Intellectual Property Clinic

Projects

• Workers' Rights Clinic, James E. Rogers College of Law: "The Workers' Rights Clinic provides students with experience in employment/labor law and workers' rights. We advocate for the rights of low-wage immigrant workers through direct service, public policy research, and community education and outreach." This website provides access to the "AZ Workers' Rights During Coronavirus" ​fact-sheet (en español) and other resources.

News

• "Lawmakers Request Investigation Into Pima County's New Restaurant Regulations," Shaley  Sanders, KOLD News 13, May 15, 2020: In this article, Sanders reports that "[l]awmakers  submitted a request to Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, asking for an investigation of new restaurant regulations passed by the Pima County Board of Supervisors." Sanders goes interview "Shefali Milczarek-Desai, an assistant clinical professor at the University of Arizona’s James E. Rogers College of Law" on the validity of these regulations under guidelines issued by Governor Ducey.

• "UA Law Prof: The Other Front Line: Immigrant Workers, Nursing Homes and COVID-19," Shefali Milczarek-Desai, Tucson.com, May 24, 2020: In this article, Milczarek-Desai writes about the challenges that immigrants working in nursing homes face during the COVID-19 epidemic. Milczarek-Desai writes that they are "situated at one of the deadliest intersections of America’s coronavirus pandemic: low-wage immigrant workers and elder care" and how they are under threat from both the risks of the virus and fears of being reported to ICE, potentially resulting in deportation or unemployment. 

• “What You Need to Know About Workplace COVID-19 Testing,” David Wichner, Tucson.com, August 1, 2020: In this article, Wichner writes, “Employers across Tucson and the nation have set up new cleaning protocols, rejiggered work schedules and revamped workplace layouts for social distancing, to get back to business safely amid the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Note: See also the Shefali Milczarek-Desai and Tara Sklar tab for more sources from Professor Milczarek-Desai.

Shefali Milczarek-Desai , Executive Director,

Intellectual Property Clinic

and 

Tara Sklar, Professor of Health Law and Director,

Health Law & Policy Program

• "Why Nursing Home Aides Exposed to COVID-19 Aren’t Taking Sick Leave," Portside, November 20, 2020: "Our research, drawing on interviews with nursing aides and emerging studies of other essential workers during COVID-19, shows how employee policies, particularly for low-paid aides, have sharply raised the risks..."

Note: See also the Shefali Milczarek-Desai and the Tara Sklar tabs for more resources from Professors Milczarek-Desai and Sklar.

Barak Y. Orbach

Professor of Law

• "Antitrust in the Shadow of Covid-19 (and Other Disruptions)," Barak Y. Orbach, Papers.SSRN.com, April 30, 2020: "Large-scale market disruptions are recurring costly phenomena whose costs can be considerably mitigated through investments in preparedness and response measures. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, this paper discusses common characteristics and levers of large-scale disruptions that courts and competition agencies should consider when interpreting the antitrust laws in normal times and periods of disruption. Antitrust enforcement is neither the cause of nor the solution to costly disruptions; rather, it is a policy instrument whose existence and effectiveness affect the costs of preparedness and response measures. Reasonably adequate antitrust enforcement standards are likely to drive down prices of products and services needed for such measures. The Covid-19 pandemic sheds light on these potential benefits of antitrust enforcement, as well as on the pervasive unwillingness to invest in sound public policies."
• "On the COVID-19 Vaccine Corporate Pledge," Barak Y. Orbach, Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, September 20, 2020: "The COVID-19 pandemic created a race for the development of vaccines. On September 8, 2020, CEOs of nine major pharmaceutical companies signed a pledge promising not to file for regulatory approval or authorization of their experimental COVID-19 vaccines until their safety and efficacy are demonstrated through established scientific standards. Fearing that political pressures would compromise regulatory processes, the CEOs agreed to curb competition among their companies."

Christopher Robertson 

Professor of Law; Associate Dean for Research & Innovation

& Tara Sklar

Professor of Health Law and Director, Health Law & Policy Program

• COVID-19: Health Law Resources, James E. Rogers College of Law: "Health law and policy questions are at the forefront of the coronavirus pandemic." The COVID-19 Health Law Resources webpage "will continue to focus on these issues and welcome your ideas, comments, and questions." This website includes the COVID-19 Video Series and provides additional resources.

Note: See also the Tara Sklar tab for more resources from Professor Sklar.

Susie Salmon

Director of Legal Writing and Clinical Professor of Law

Practice in Place: Law and Justice Go Viral, UArizona Law Legal Writing, Anchor.FM: "A podcast that asks the question: how does a profession governed by precedent respond to the unprecedented? Practice in Place investigates how the practice of law and the administration of justice have adapted under the abrupt constraints of the COVID-19 era, how that has affected how and whether we achieve justice, and how those changes and that experience might or should change the practice, the profession, and its procedures forever. Produced by University of Arizona, James E. Rogers College of Law and hosted by Professor Susie Salmon and the Legal Writing Program."

Tara Sklar

Professor of Health Law and Director, Health Law & Policy Program

• "Are schools liable in the event of a COVID-19 outbreak?," Kassandra Lau, Arizona Public Media, August 14, 2020: "UA law professor Tara Sklar explains how vulnerable schools could be to legal challenges."
• "COVID-19 in Classrooms: What should Tucson schools share with the public?," Melissa Egan, KOLD News 13, August 25, 2020: Featuring Tara Sklar - "Two Tucson schools have closed in the last week due to COVID-19 cases among students and staff."
• "Law and Telemedicine in the Time of COVID-19," Tara Sklar, Arizona Telemedicine Program, May 7, 2020: In this article, Professor Sklar discusses how the "long-awaited promise of telemedicine may finally be realized as a response to Covid-19." Professor Sklar goes on to discuss "three major legal barriers in federal and state laws that were inhibiting telemedicine utilization" identified by her and Professor Christopher Robertson in the Fall of 2019. 
• "Legal Experts Call on Officials to Shore Up Pandemic Response," Cameron Langford, Courthouse News Service, August 18, 2020: Featuring Tara Sklar - "Though courts have largely sided with governments in challenges to shutdown orders, experts say states should clarify the scope of emergency powers to avoid these disputes in the future."
• "Slowing the Spread, Businesses Reopen, Pandemic's Economic Impact," Kassandra Lau, Arizona 360, Arizona Public Media, May 15, 2020: In this episode, Lau interviews UArizona experts on "what businesses and employers are liable for when it comes to preventing an outbreak." Lau goes on to discuss the legal basis for precautions being adopted by companies and institutions, such as the requirement of face masks and temperature checks, with Tara Sklar, an expert in health law and policy with the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law. 
• "States are Making it Harder to Sue Nursing Homes Over COVID-19 : Why Immunity from Lawsuits is a Problem," Tara Sklar, The Conversation, June 9, 2020: In this article Professor Sklar discusses how "states are protecting nursing homes from aggrieved residents and their loved ones who may have suffered harm, injuries or death due to their actions – or inactions – during COVID-19." Professor Sklar goes on to explains why law professors "view the industry’s demands for additional protections against lawsuits as a dangerous overreach at a time when high numbers of health violations show nursing homes need more oversight, not less."

Note: See also the Christopher Robertson & Tara Sklar tab and the Shefali Milczarek-Desai and Tara Sklar tab for more resources from Professor Sklar.

Marvin Slepian, MD, Regents' Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Engineering;

James Coan, Chief Strategy Officer at Remedy; 

Andrew Coan, Professor of Law; Director, William H. Rehnquist Center on the Constitutional Structures of Government

• "Generous — and Inclusive — Sick Leave is a Must for Any Business That Wants to Reopen Safely," Business Insider, June 23, 2020: In this article, the authors write, "As states across the country reopen for business, employers of all sizes have scrambled to develop prework screening protocols to identify and exclude infected employees from the workplace. The CDC has endorsed this strategy in its first formal guidelines for reopening employers. There is one major problem: Screening works only if employees report their symptoms and exposure history honestly.” The authors go on to write about how “the logical solution is more generous and flexible sick leave.”

Note: See also the Toni Massaro, Justin Pidot & Marvin Slepian tab for more resources from Marvin Slepian. See also the Andrew Coan tab for more resources from Professor Coan.