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Ed. Note: Welcome to our daily feature Trivia Question of the Day!
According to data collected by the 2020 NLJ 500 ranking, which top 500 law firm lost the greatest number of attorneys from 2018 to 2019?
Hint: 109 lawyers left this firm last year.
See the answer on the next page.
Artificial intelligence software developed to help litigation attorneys get more quickly to the core of a case is now showing promise in helping medical researchers fast-track their inquiries into how to treat COVID-19.
At the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, e-discovery pioneers Maura R. Grossman and Gordon V. Cormack have found a new use for machine-learning technology they developed to help attorneys more quickly sift through large collections of discovery documents — helping medical staff more quickly search massive databases of COVID-related clinical studies.
Meanwhile, data scientists and product managers at e-discovery company Relativity are employing several of their technology tools for the similar purpose of helping medical researchers more quickly review data sets of journal articles and medical literature with the goal of better equipping them to battle COVID-19.
In the Waterloo case, Grossman and Cormack are well known in the e-discovery field for their development of a technology-assisted review tool that uses a continuous active learning protocol. Of the various TAR or predictive coding tools on the market, theirs has been scientifically demonstrated to deliver the best results.
When the coronavirus crisis hit, Grossman, formerly e-discovery counsel at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz in New York and now research professor and director of the Women in Science Program in the school of computer science at Waterloo, and Cormack, professor at the computer science school, had already been dabbling in the use of TAR to research health topics, she told me recently.
They saw a process that had many parallels to law, in that expensive medical researchers were spending large amounts of time reviewing hundreds or thousands of clinical studies, just as expensive lawyers spend large amounts of time reviewing documents in discovery.
Seeing an opportunity to help, they began working with the knowledge synthesis team at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, on behalf of the Canadian Frailty Network and Health Canada, to automate literature searches related to COVID-19.
The goal, as described in an article posted by the computer science school, was to help the team quickly identify clinical studies that have evaluated the effective and safety of various measures to keep nursing facilities safe, as well as treatments for patients with COVID-19.
Using their CAL technology, Grossman and Cormack have been able to help St. Michael’s researchers complete in two weeks reviews that would typically take a year or more.
“Searching and finding studies for systematic reviews has traditionally been a time-consuming and laborious process that uses keyword search, followed by manual screening of abstracts, and finally full papers,” Grossman said in the article. “We are instead training a machine learning algorithm to perform the initial steps in this task.”
Analyzing COVID-19 Data
At e-discovery company Relativity, data scientists and product managers likewise saw a role for their technology and skills in helping in the fight against COVID-19. Recently, I discussed Relativity’s response with Rebecca BurWei, senior data scientist; Andrea Beckman, director of product management; and Trish Gleason, product manager.
They were prompted to act after the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released a massive dataset of COVID-19 medical research and issued a call to action to the tech community to develop text- and data-mining techniques to help scientists use the data to answer high-priority questions about COVID-19.
The tech community was encouraged to submit tools through Kaggle, a machine learning and data science community owned by Google Cloud, so that the tools would be openly available for researchers anywhere in the world. Kaggle sweetened the request with a $1,000 award for the tool that best met the project criteria.
Relativity responded using its existing AI and text-mining tools. Specifically, it offered four ways in which its technology could assist in facilitating the review of the data:
Elimination of duplicates. Deduplication is a task familiar to any e-discovery attorney, eliminating duplicate and redundant copies of email messages and other documents, in order to enhance the effectiveness of the AI software. When Relativity staff learned from the Kaggle forum that the COVID-19 researchers were seeing the same articles come up repeatedly, they saw a role for their deduplication technology. Using Relativity’s Textual Near Duplicates and Repeated Content Identification tools, they reviewed the dataset and identified over 4,000 duplicate articles and a handful of commonly repeated phrases.
Tagging studies by language. Because the dataset included literature from throughout the world, articles were in many languages. Relativity used its Language Identification tool, which can identify text from 100 languages, and was able to tag over 52,000 COVID-19 journal articles by the language in which they were written. Relativity provided this language-tagged dataset to the Kaggle community, earning praise from a Kaggle community leader for having created a “great dataset.”
Better keyword search of risk factors. Relativity’s Conceptual Analytics uses a machine learning methodology called latent semantic analysis to extract insights and patterns from document data. Based on this technology, Relativity used keyword expansion to find concepts related to cancer and chronic respiratory diseases as risk factors for COVID-19. With those concepts, it was able to find 98 relevant journal articles that would otherwise have been missed.
Identifying pediatric patients. A goal of the Kaggle community’s AI-powered literature review was to auto-fill summaries of COVID-19 journal articles, so that public health experts could decide quickly whether they needed to read the full article. Relativity contributed to this project by identifying and summarizing Spanish journal articles that involved asymptomatic pediatric patients.
Relativity’s data scientists first used regular expression searches to filter down to a small number of relevant articles, then they experimented with new AI techniques not currently available in the e-discovery product, such as modern vectorizers and question-answer techniques, to automatically extract the ages of the study participants.
Rewarding Use Of Tech
For Grossman and Cormack at Waterloo and the product team at Relativity, using their e-discovery skills to help with COVID-19 research has been rewarding.
“What was most rewarding for me was the community angle and being able to help out during this crisis,” said Relativity’s Andrea Beckman. “We have a strong community in e-discovery, but here we got to join a different group and be part of everybody coming together in tackling a critical challenge.”
Grossman drew a contrast with the legal profession’s slow pace of adoption of cutting-edge AI technology such as TAR, due in part to its fear of losing the billable hour.
“Here we’re in an area where the incentives are exactly the opposite, where there is receptiveness to something that will cut time and cut costs,” she said. “It’s refreshing to work in an area where the reception capacity and adoption rate is very different.”
Robert Ambrogi
is a Massachusetts lawyer and journalist who has been covering legal technology and the web for more than 20 years, primarily through his blog LawSites.com. Former editor-in-chief of several legal newspapers, he is a fellow of the College of Law Practice Management and an inaugural Fastcase 50 honoree. He can be reached by email at ambrogi@gmail.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@BobAmbrogi).
2020 is a weird year. I certainly never imaged a chair of a Biglaw firm sending out a reminder to all U.S. employees that um, yes, you really do need to hit your billable hours. Usually that “billables before all else” mentality is hardwired into Biglaw, but, like I said, this is a weird year.
Anyway, McDermott Will & Emery Chair Ira Coleman sent out an email letting everyone know that the firm’s planned reopening of their offices, scheduled for post July 4th, was not going to happen. What with the American response to COVID-19 being a terrifying hodgepodge that has, in various jurisdictions, prioritized economy over health leading to a dangerous spike across the country. But then Coleman points out that yeah, things are tough right now but we really have to get back to billing:
However, now that we’ve moved beyond the initial period of disruption, we need to focus on picking up our stride. Schedules from home can be erratic as our family and work responsibilities are blended more than ever, but we must continue to dig deep to hit our hours, reach out to clients (even if just to check in), help out colleagues, engage in BD or marketing efforts, or participate in pro bono projects. These next few months will be critical in helping us bounce forward and accelerate through this crisis, so let’s make them count.
We know that many are taking some well-deserved days off over the nest few weeks — and that’s great. We strongly encourage everyone to make time to rest and recharge so we can surge ahead, This is what star athletes do, and it’s a lesson we can all heed to help our team reach peak performance. It’s not that we won’t stumble, but we will always pick ourselves up, rally together and emerge even stronger.
And Coleman deserves some credit — other folks in Biglaw have made a similar point without the compassion. His email at least recognizes some of the reasons folks may not be billing with the same gusto as in the before-times. But the message remains… you’d best get back to billing. This is the new normal and your hours need to reflect that.
Read Coleman’s full email below.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).
I think more representation needs to be out there, and this is a time where I am actually hopeful that representation will be meaningful. I don’t know of any other nonbinary attorneys in Biglaw. I’m aware of nonbinary attorneys at smaller firms and shops. So I think it’s a really big deal that we can break that barrier. Being gender-nonconforming as a litigator is not uncomplicated: litigation is about sharing narratives and stories and presenting the more believable version of the truth by having a story fit together and work.
Part of that story is the lawyer: they’re the narrator putting together a picture of themselves that should support the truth they’re telling. As it stands, being nonbinary has the possibility of distracting from that story, and I’m trying to leverage my position in Biglaw and make it less likely that this will be something a judge may find distracting.
— Rafael Langer-Osuna, a litigation partner in the San Francisco office of Squire Patton Boggs, commenting on their decision to come out as one of Biglaw’s first openly nonbinary attorneys. Langer-Osuna uses they/them pronouns, and says of their coming out at the firm, “After recognizing that this is a lifelong journey that I’m working through that is not shared by the majority of people around me, I came to the conclusion that I wanted to be who I am, fully, with people I work with.”
Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.
It’s amazing what legislators can do when they put their minds to it! Mississippi’s political representatives have insisted since the flag was adopted in 1894 that the prominent stars and bars in the corner honored the state’s history. Heritage not hate, doncha know!
Why the state would choose to honor only the four years it fought a war to maintain the enslavement of Black people, out of its entire 203 year-long history, is a mystery. (No, it really isn’t). But the flag will be removed from all government buildings within the next two weeks after the legislature convened an emergency session to replace it and Governor Tate Reeves promised to sign the bill.
And while it’s probably an oversimplification to say that Mississippi State running back Kylin Hill forced the legislature to ditch the flag, he certainly gave it the final push.
The protests gripping the country since George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police on May 25 kicked something loose, and the argument for maintaining racist symbols became increasingly untenable. The SEC and NCAA had already warned Mississippi that it would be barred from hosting championship games the week before the star player threatened to sit out the season if the flag didn’t come down.
Bulldogs’ coach Mike Leach supported Hill, then Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin followed suit. By Thursday, fifty Mississippi coaches had descended on the capital to testify in support of removing the Confederate symbol from the state’s flag. And suddenly the impossible became inevitable.
On Saturday, the Mississippi House of Representatives voted 91-23 for replacement, and on Sunday the Senate adopted the removal resolution 37-14 after a rigorous debate.
“When we remove our history or set our history aside, then we lose the opportunity to educate and inform and to have a conversation about what the true meaning of things are,” argued GOP Senator Melanie Sojourner, adding that “if we remove things, we don’t have the opportunity to have the conversations.”
But apparently there were a lot of conversations going on behind the scenes, and the bill picked up Republican support between Saturday and Sunday, when it became clear that the Overton window for “Positions You Can Credibly Claim to Hold Without Being a Racist” had narrowed significantly.
Even Jefferson Davis’s great-great grandson Bertram Hayes-Davis weighed in on making history into history, and not allowing it to define the present.
“It is historic and heritage-related, there are a lot of people who look at it that way, and God bless them for that heritage,” Hayes-Davis told CNN. “So put it in a museum and honor it there, or put it in your house, but the flag of Mississippi should represent the entire population, and I am thrilled that we’re finally going to make that change.”
A committee will convene to envision a new flag featuring the words “In God we trust,” to be submitted to voters for approval in November. Which has more than a whiff of government establishment of a religion, but it’s not overtly racist so … let’s call that a win!
Paul Finebaum credits Kylin Hill for Mississippi flag change [247sports]
Mississippi House and Senate vote to remove Confederate icon from state flag [WaPo]
Elizabeth Dye (@5DollarFeminist) lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.
How did COVID-19 disrupt the legal industry? In short, it ushered in a new way of doing business.
Join us on July 17th at 1 p.m. ET / 10 a.m. PT and see how the legal profession rapidly evolved in response to the coronavirus pandemic, from client acquistion and new service offerings to mobilizing an entire firm to work remotely.
The landscape has changed quickly, addressing how firms engage virtually with clients and leverage new digital solutions to analyze the business and offer new types of services, while ensuring safeguards to data security and adhering to compliance best practices.
As a result, COVID-19 has brought digital transformation to the forefront of the legal industry, requiring law firms to optimize their business in a digital age, and deliver client services free of traditional brick-and-mortar office visits and paper files.
Key Objectives:
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(Image via Getty)
Current and former law students at George Mason University have shared with Above the Law their personal stories of mistreatment and discrimination at the school. Some of these tipsters asked not to have their stories published — they just wanted someone to tell and to provide background. But taking in all these stories what becomes immediately clear is that when a faculty that excitedly changes the name of the school to honor a man who used his seat to question if Black people were worthy of higher education, they might have some serious diversity problems of their own.
That’s what happens when you name your school ASSLaw!
The word “toxic” came up more than once and not in the context of “dumping sludge in the river” like the faculty supports. An informal survey taken in October revealed a widespread problem. As Emily Kvalheim laid out last week, students spoke of minority students being targeted for random ID checks and LGBTQ students that feel “this school forced me to go back into the closet on my sexuality.” Remember: THIS IS A PUBLIC SCHOOL. One comical tip we received involved a Black student — not at the law school — ending up in promotional materials because the school couldn’t be bothered to find diversity within their own enrollment. While that story was good for a chuckle, it underscores a broken institution replete with daily, intimate acts of discrimination and harassment.
It’s almost as if when libertarians say, “I’m not racist, I just care about constitutional principles,” they mean to say, “I am racist but I prefer to hide my biases behind cherry picking constitutional principles.” It may seem like a fine distinction but they mean the same thing when you consider the original public meaning.
A number of student groups have now come together to demand the school take this matter seriously. The full collective statement, available here, makes a number of straightforward and fairly non-controversial demands. Among other things, it asks for the involvement of diverse law students in recruiting efforts, a concerted effort to correct the school’s woeful Black student underrepresentation, basic diversity training, and the appointment of Director of Diversity Services to be responsible for all of this.
Most student groups at ASSLaw signed onto this statement. Can you guess who didn’t? Because it’s the biggest group on campus!
Yes, the Federalist Society is notably absent in this call for the institution to take basic steps toward creating an inclusive environment. In case you’re wondering what the mood inside the FedSoc is right now, a current conservative law student took to Legal Insurrection to vent about how uncomfortable he is that students who aren’t him are talking about problems he doesn’t personally deal with.
This week, Scalia Law’s Student Bar Association (SBA), in contravention of its supposed non-partisanship, issued a letter to the school’s administration, copying the entire student body, which contained a set of radical, Black Lives Matter-esque demands. The letter demanded, among other things, full tuition scholarships for all black students, affirmative action programs, special funding for “diverse” clubs to bring speakers of “intersectional identities”, and mandatory “race equity” trainings for all faculty, staff, and students.
“Non-partisanship” carries a lot of baggage in that paragraph, saying that the school should, “create and publish specific procedures within its own administration for responding to reports of discrimination, harassment, and misconduct” is thus, by implication, a “partisan” demand. And, in case you were wondering, he will absolutely quote Martin Luther King to explain why affirmative action is bad in the very next paragraph because Legal Insurrection articles are just Mad Libs for white grievances.
The student does claim that the Federalist Society simply had no idea that this letter was coming — which others dispute — but then blows any political capital this exclusion might have carried when he doesn’t suggest that the group would’ve signed on if given an opportunity. Rather, he bemoans that FedSoc wasn’t given an opportunity to gut the letter to the point of meaninglessness, which is certainly a kind of cooperative effort. But this gripe gets to the heart of the whole conservative complaint about race and diversity. If white people aren’t at the center of everything, the snowflake alarms go off at FedSoc headquarters. It’s discriminating based on race to recruit students for not being white, while it’s not discriminating when Black students get harassed at the library… for not being white. Here, students are allowed to have opinions… as long as the white people get to edit them for content.
Unfortunately, the faculty has displayed a steadfast refusal to consider its dumpster fire of a record on this issue, instead offering weak excuses and relying on the transient nature of the JD lifecycle to kick the can down the road. I’ve said it before: this is a public school and someone from the state government needs to get involved before things get better.
Hopefully I’m wrong about that and this effort will yield tangible results, but I doubt it.
Earlier: Shockingly, Law School Named For Affirmative Action Opponent Bad At Race And Diversity
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
A federal judge claims he didn’t know what he was doing when he blew that dog whistle, but is apparently really sorry about it.
This racial controversy comes to us from the Central District of California, where Judge Cormac J. Carney began his term as the court’s chief judge on June 1. Shortly after that, during a webinar sponsored by the local chapter of the Federal Bar Association Judge Carney, well, he stepped in it.
As reported by the Los Angeles Times, in describing his acclimation adjusting to his new position on the court, he described working with Kiry Gray, the first Black woman to serve as the court’s executive and clerk of the court:
“Fortunately for me, we have just a fabulous clerk of the court in Kiry Gray. She’s so street-smart and really knows her job,” Carney said.
Folks were understandably upset with the racial connotations of calling this court professional “street-smart” as opposed to any number of terms denoting competence. As Carney himself describes, in a later conversation with Gray, Carney learned people were upset over his comment and sought to have him step down from his role as chief judge. And that’s when he compounded the problem:
“In a moment of anger and frustration, I said to Ms. Gray that the people criticizing me were equating my well-intended use of the term ‘street-smart’ with the reprehensible conduct of a police officer putting his knee on a person’s neck,” Carney said.
Carney did not include the exact quote, but he apologized: “My statement was wrong. It was directed at my critics, not Ms. Gray, and I said it with no ill will or disrespect towards people of color. My statement was an insensitive and graphic overreaction to the criticism that was leveled against me. I never should have made the comparison.”
Judge Carney tried to explain his initial use of “street-smart” (“To me, the term means a person of great common sense, initiative, and ability to work with people and get things done. It saddened me greatly to learn that some people view the term to be demeaning to people of color. I never knew that there was a different definition of the term.”) in an email to all court employees sent June 26th. In that email, Carney also announced he was stepping down from his role as chief judge:
“I have apologized to Ms. Gray, but I have concluded that a simple apology will not put this matter to rest. There will be division in the Court, unnecessary, negative and hurtful publicity, and a diversion from the Court’s essential mission of administering justice if I were to continue serving as the Chief District Judge,” Carney wrote in the email, which The Times reviewed. “I cannot allow the Court to become politicized and embroiled in controversy.”
He will keep that lifetime appointment though. Judge Philip S. Gutierrez, appointed by George W. Bush as Carney was, will take over the role of chief.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Photo via Wikimedia Commons)
Just a few short years ago, we lamented the fact that a portion of the population had “never heard of” the Supreme Court, and that nearly two-thirds of Americans couldn’t name a single Supreme Court justice. These days, people are much more aware of the high court’s existence, if only for political reasons, and they’re much more knowledgable about the identities of certain justices thanks to their controversial confirmation hearings, highly acclaimed biopics, documentaries, and pop-culture celebrity, and a president who gripes about some of them on Twitter.
That’s why the results of the latest Economist/YouGov survey, where respondents were asked to rate all of the Supreme Court justices, were a bit unsurprising.
Let’s start out with the basics before we get to the justices’ favorability ratings. According to the survey, 48 percent of Americans approve of the current Supreme Court, while 26 percent disapprove. Can you believe that back in the day (between 1987 and 2010), the high court’s approval rating never fell below 57 percent, and was oftentimes higher than 70 percent? Those were simpler times.
Now, before we start discussing the names of the judges who ranked the highest in the favorability poll, we’ll break down the Economist/YouGov survey’s methodology for you. From June 21 to June 23, 1,500 American adults were asked whether they found each Supreme Court justice “very favorable,” “somewhat favorable,” “somewhat unfavorable,” “very unfavorable,” and “not sure” (a rating which we’re guessing amounts to a polite “uh, who?”).
How do SCOTUS justices stack up against one another when it comes to favorability?
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg took home the top prize, with 42 percent rating her “very” or “somewhat” favorable,” while 26 percent rated her “very” or “somewhat” unfavorable. Thirty-three percent of respondents were “not sure” about her.
President Trump’s Supreme Court appointments, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, both fared worse than Ginsburg in the eyes of the public. Kavanaugh broke even with 33 percent rating him “very” or “somewhat” favorable, while 33 percent rated him “very” or “somewhat” unfavorable. Thirty-four percent were “not sure” about him. As for Gorsuch, 27 percent rated him “very” or “somewhat” favorable, 23 percent rated him “very” or “somewhat” unfavorable, and 50 percent weren’t sure about him at all.
Mediaite has the details on the rest of the justices’ favorability ratings:
Justice Sonia Sotomayor notched 27 percent total favorable versus 21 percent unfavorable, and 42 percent “not sure.”
Justice Elena Kagan scored 27 percent total favorable, 18 percent total unfavorable, and 54 percent “not sure.”
Justice Samuel Alito got 27 percent total favorable, 20 percent total unfavorable, and 54 percent “not sure.”
Chief Justice John Roberts was at 31 percent total favorable, 24 percent total unfavorable, and 44 percent “not sure.”
Justice Stephen Breyer tallied 25 percent total favorable, 15 percent total unfavorable, and 59 percent “not sure.”
And Justice Clarence Thomas scored 33 percent total favorable, 28 percent total unfavorable, and 38 percent “not sure.”
It’s worth noting that Kavanaugh was the only justice who failed to achieve positive net favorability in this survey. At least he still has his beer.
Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.
Wear the mask. Not only because it’s better to be safe than sorry, but because, yes, your state has the right to require you to wear a mask during a pandemic. The states’ power to establish and enforce laws to protect the public welfare, safety, and health, commonly known as the police power, is supported by the Tenth Amendment. While the Constitution has been amended in countless ways since its execution, the police power as it relates to public health has been largely untouched by later construction.
From the Constitution’s early days, the courts have contemplated the government’s ability to protect the “public health,” or society’s interest in assuring healthy living conditions, by regulating society in times of widespread disease. Chief Justice John Marshall defended the police powers in Gibbons v. Ogden, including “inspection laws, quarantine laws, [and] health laws of every description.” Gibbons v. Ogden, 22 US 1, 78 (1824).
Throughout the early 19th century, the whole country had been “roused” by the “havoc” wrought by yellow fever for years. Smith v. Turner, 48 U.S. 283, 341 (1849). It was not long after yellow fever ran rampant through the colonies, and then the states, that the issue of mandatory smallpox vaccination arose before the Supreme Court in Jacobson v. Massachusetts. The Court found that the states had the right to impose upon an individual’s body by requiring that they submit to vaccination for smallpox, and that the individual must give up certain freedoms for the benefit of living in a civilized society. “[T]he liberty secured by the Constitution of the United States to every person within its jurisdiction does not import an absolute right in each person to be, at all times and in all circumstances, wholly free from restraint.” Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11, 29 (1905). The Court determined this, in part, on the grounds that, as Edward Richards and Katharine Rathbun so aptly noted, “this is the bargain that makes public health possible.”
Mask requirements, while perhaps irritating, are certainly less of an imposition than a vaccine. They are also legally sound. Justice John Marshall Harlan in Jacobson emphasized necessity — a demonstrable and nonarbitrary threat to public health; reasonability — the “real or substantial relation” of the requirement to protecting public health; proportionality — the interference with individual autonomy ought to be proportional to the expected benefit; and harm avoidance — those posing a risk to society can be required to submit to certain measures for the public good, or, if a person can demonstrate they would be harmed by those measures, quarantine. Similar balancing tests are still applied today, and requiring a mask certainly passes those tests. Richards and Rathbun’s aforementioned article further notes that, for a disease-control program that imposes restrictions on individual liberties to survive a constitutional challenge, the program must meet five standards. The public health requirement must (1) address an actual problem that poses a direct threat to third parties; (2) develop a science-backed control strategy; (3) implement that strategy in the most effective way while minimizing restrictions on individuals, considering the resources available; (4) periodically evaluate the restrictions to show efficacy; and (5) phase out the restrictions when they are no longer epidemiologically warranted. The mask requirement in the face of a confirmed and still rising (in the U.S.) health crisis certainly satisfies those standards. This may be perceived as, perhaps, a low bar for state imposition on individual liberty. But being required to wear a mask to protect the health of oneself and others is a bargain.
Megan E. McKenzie, a recent graduate of Georgetown University Law Center, works at Balestriere Fariello while her admission to the bar is pending. She works with her colleagues on all aspects of domestic and international complex litigation, arbitration, appeals, and investigations. You can reach her by email at megan.e.mckenzie@balestrierefariello.com