Volume 31, Issue 1 (Fall 2023)
Prefatory Matter
Front Matter and Table of Contents
Foreward
The Radical Potential of Creating Communities of Care Through Art
Rhoda Rosen and Amanda Leigh Davis
Articles
The Uneven Legal Geographies of Nutrition Entitlement Programs in the United States. Realizing or Hindering the Right to Food?
Joshua Lohnes and Mackenzie Steele
Unlike many countries across the world, the United States government does not formally recognize the Right to Food in law. However, it funds and administers nutrition entitlement programs that play a significant role in mitigating hunger and food insecurity across the country. Reflecting on the socio-political dynamics that shape the legal spaces of nutrition entitlement in different places, this Article explores the uneven geographies of the Right to Food in two other countries (South Africa and Ecuador) and then turns its focus to the United States. This Article offers an overview of the two most extensive nutrition entitlement programs (SNAP and school nutrition programs) and their implementation at the state level in West Virginia. The case study of West Virginia points to the key role that local jurisdictions also play in fulfilling or hindering the Right to Food in specific places, and suggests that legal spaces there are also important sites of Right to Food organizing and advocacy.
Sacred Nutrition: Asserting Indigenous Sovereignty and Rights of Women and Nature to Ensure the Right to Food in the United States
Mariana Chilton, PhD, MPH
This Paper is a provocation to move beyond a standard human rights and right to food framework to encourage scholars, activists, and political leaders to engage in full throttle societal transformation. Ending hunger in the United States demands nothing less. The modern human rights framework is enshrined in the modern nation-state system that is rooted in the transatlantic slave trade, colonization, and genocide.1 Three primary ways in which these roots took hold were through land theft, rape, and starvation. Hence, to assert that integrating the right to food and freedom from hunger into nation-state constitutions or into national plans to end hunger without significantly altering the structure of the nation-state will be fundamentally ineffective. Nation states currently depend on keeping people hungry, especially women and children.2 If this is the case, then we ought to consider new ways of envisioning and devising a world in which all people are free from hunger and have good nutrition that supports human and more-than human flourishing. To do so demands we address food insecurity at its roots.
This Paper relies on twenty-five years of empirical research with Black women, Native communities, and other groups of color, as well as on the scholarship of Black and Native thinkers. In doing so, the Paper outlines how rape, colonization, racism, and gender discrimination continue to generate food insecurity and hunger, and how incorporating a broad view of the right to food to support rights of women, Indigenous peoples, peoples of African descent, and the rural poor are integral to the right to food. Finally, this Paper shows that societal transformation can only be made possible through providing reparations to descendants of people who were enslaved, respecting and repairing treaty rights with Native nations, and changing human beings’ relationship with the natural world from viewing food as commodity to revering food and the natural world as kin with equal standing to humans. In doing so, we can meet the challenges of the climate catastrophe and promote resilience of future generations.
Symosium Report
Food, Housing, and Racial Justice Symposium
Denisse Córdova Montes, Tamar Ezer, Photini Kamvisseli Suarez, Katherine Murray, Julian Seethal, Mackenzie Steele, and Sarah Walters
Student Notes
This Note addresses the increasing rent problem in Florida, explains why rent control is not the best solution, and suggests alternative remedies. Rent control refers to laws and regulations that control how much a landlord can increase the price charged to tenants to live in an apartment. Florida enacted a statute in 1977 that currently bans rent control in the state but has an exception in the case of a housing emergency. This exception allows local governments to put a one-year rent control ordinance to a public vote. Orange County, Florida, recently declared a housing emergency and had residents vote on the issue. This Note will look to and compare the successes and failures of rent control implementation across cities in the United States and Europe and describe why other municipalities in Florida should not follow suit to Orange County and instead seek alternative remedies to produce more affordable housing for its citizens.
Cybersecurity is the safeguarding of computer systems and networks against information disclosure, theft, or damage to users’ hardware, software, or electronic data, as well as disruption or misdirection of the services computers and networks provide. Knowing privacy would be breached due to the impact of COVID, in 2020, the United Kingdom got ahead of the game and passed rules/regulations requiring online services to protect children under the age of eighteen from scams, phishing, and security attacks. However, currently, the United States does not have a sufficient uniform privacy law governed to protect children under the age of eighteen from cybersecurity threats. Instead, the majority of regulations are handled on a state-by-state basis, and unlike the UK most regulations are not specifically intended to protect children. Fortunately, in 2022, California signed into law an act that requires businesses that provide an online service, product, or feature likely to be accessed by children to comply with specified requirements to safeguard against hackers.
This Note will begin by describing how and why the United Kingdom’s regulations work to protect children from security risks. It then provides an overview of the US legislative framework at the federal and state levels contending that a piecemeal approach leaves children at risk. Although some states have enacted protective legislation, it demonstrates that many have not gone far enough and identified one state, California, as the best practice. This Note concludes by comparing the United Kingdom’s and California’s Age- Appropriate Design Codes for users under the age of eighteen and recommends that the rest of the United States should combine the two approaches to create a uniform legislative framework at the federal level that requires businesses that develop online services to provide a high-privacy default standard, where children’s personal data is only visible or accessible to other users of the service if the parents amend their settings to allow this via an age assurance security check.
Revamping Green Securitization Frameworks in the EU
Samuel Pinson
Sustainable finance and green investments have grown from a trend to a dominant investment strategy throughout asset classes globally, and the EU is no exception. The EU published its Green New Deal and Sustainable Finance Strategy as roadmaps toward a more sustainable and equitable future. The twin reports contain comprehensive plans and initiatives to make sustainable finance more accessible through effective regulation. Stemming from those initiatives were various regulatory frameworks such as the EU Taxonomy, the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation, and the EU Green Bond Standard. The regulations above are aimed at everything from public company disclosure requirements to a comprehensive categorization system for sustainable financial products in the case of the EU Taxonomy. Also relevant to this Note is the EU Securitization Regulation, which serves as a framework for securitized products, disclosures, reporting, and structuring. However, even in the presence of deliberate regulation, headwinds in the securitization market could dampen sustainable finance initiatives. For example, greenwashing, scaling risk, and a lack of uniform measurement are three issues that underscore the complexities and roadblocks of rolling out sustainable securitization more broadly. However, the existing regulatory backdrop, comprising sustainability regulations in financial services, could regulate many aspects of the securitization process, from identification of collateral, structuring transactions, originator and issuer disclosures, and investor protection. Moreover, the existing frameworks will need to be tailored towards securitization, public-private partnerships will need to be adopted, and ratings and oversight processes will need to be tailored towards green securitized products to encompass the securitization process’s complexities adequately.
