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This study models local and cross-city transmissions of the novel coronavirus in China between January 19 and February 29, 2020. We examine the role of various socioeconomic mediating factors, including public health measures that encourage social distancing in local communities. Weather characteristics 2 weeks prior are used as instrumental variables for causal inference. Stringent quarantines, city lockdowns, and local public health measures imposed in late January significantly decreased the virus transmission rate. The virus spread was contained by the middle of February. Population outflow from the outbreak source region posed a higher risk to the destination regions than other factors, including geographic proximity and similarity in economic conditions. We quantify the effects of different public health measures in reducing the number of infections through counterfactual analyses. Over 1.4 million infections and 56,000 deaths may have been avoided as a result of the national and provincial public health measures imposed in late January in China.

Over the last fifteen years, the problem of human trafficking has become a focus of government and advocacy agendas worldwide. Increasingly referred to as “modern-day slavery,” the phenomenon has prompted rapid proliferation of international, regional, and national anti-trafficking laws, and inspired states to devote enormous financial and bureaucratic resources to its eradication. It has also spawned an industry of nonprofits that have elevated the “abolition” of trafficking into a pressing moral campaign, which anyone can join with the click of a mouse. Scholars have also jumped into the fray, calling on states to marshal human rights law, tax law, trade law, tort law, public health law, labor law, and even military might to combat this apparently growing international crime and human rights violation.

This essay involves a further, albeit still early and provisional, analysis of the relationship between prosumption and capitalism. It is made necessary by the rapid changes in the nature of prosumption, its relationship to the changing capitalist economic system, as well as the growing literature on them (Piketty 2014; Rifkin 2014; Ritzer 2014). Like its predecessor (Ritzer and Jurgenson 2010), this analysis deals with the ever-expanding prosumption on the Internet, but it goes beyond the now antiquated notion of Web 2.0, as well as devoting greater attention to prosumption in more traditional settings. It also reflects significant changes in my own conceptualization of prosumption, especially the idea of the prosumption continuum (see Figure). The poles of the continuum involve a needed reconceptualization of production as prosumption-as-production (p-a-p) and of consumption as prosumption-as-consumption (p-a-c). More attention is devoted to three types of capitalism (producer, consumer, and prosumer), as well as to the 'grand narrative' of producer capitalism>consumer capitalism>prosumer capitalism. New to this analysis is another grand narrative relating to exploitation in capitalism: singly exploitative producer capitalism>doubly exploitative consumer capitalism>synergistically doubly exploitative prosumer capitalism. From a Marxian perspective, prosumer capitalism is seen as an even more 'magical' system than its predecessors, at least as far as the capitalists are concerned. There is also a reexamination of capitalism in light of other important recent characterizations of that economic system. While others foresee the decline or even demise of capitalism (Rifkin 2014) or shift the focus to increasing inequality (Piketty 2014), this analysis foresees the continuation of capitalism, albeit in the form of prosumer capitalism. The conclusion takes a pessimistic perspective on the fate of the prosumer in contemporary capitalism (in contrast to Toffler [1980] and Rifkin [2014]), although some thoughts are offered on a more optimistic scenario. The essay ends pessimistically with some recent examples of capitalist expansions and incursions in prosumer-dominated businesses (Zopa in banking, Airbnb in short-term domicile rental, and Uber in the taxi business). Adapted from the source document.

We live in a shrinking world where interdependence between countries and communities is increasing. These changes also affect—as they should—the concept of sovereignty. In past decades the predominant conception of sovereignty was akin to owning a large estate separated from other properties by rivers or deserts. By contrast, today’s reality is more analogous to owning a small apartment in one densely packed high-rise that is home to two hundred separate families. The sense of interdependency is heightened when we recognize the absence of any alternative to this shared home, of any exit from this global high-rise. The privilege of bygone days of opting out, of retreating into splendid isolation, of adopting mercantilist policies or erecting iron curtains is no longer realistically available.

This Article theorizes “security” as a site of continuing struggle in the international system between competing approaches to identifying and responding to urgent threats. Rather than endorsing a single approach, this Article argues that a claim to “security” can imply any one of four approaches to law and policy, each of which has radically divergent implications for who is empowered by a security claim and how that power interacts with existing legal rules. By moving among these four approaches, security claims can disrupt established systems of knowledge-production and redescribe the world in new ways.

Judges and scholars have interpreted human rights treaties as obligating states to mitigate climate change by limiting their greenhouse gas emissions, an argument instrumental to the development of climate litigation. This Article questions the validity of this interpretation. A state's treaty obligation to protect human rights implies an obligation to cooperate on the mitigation of climate change, the Article argues, only if and inasmuch as climate change mitigation effectively protects the enjoyment of treaty rights by individuals within the state's territory or under its jurisdiction. As such, human rights treaties open only a narrow window on the applicability of general mitigation obligations arising under climate treaties and customary international law.

Having recently emerged from its unenviable status as the runt of international law, the phenomenon of statelessness nonetheless eludes traditional international legal instruments. Confronted with questions of nationality that typically fall within the domain of sovereignty, international and regional human rights bodies struggle to rein in the increasingly creative measures that states adopt to obscure the production and persistence of statelessness. This Article uncovers and dissects the different ways in which states manufacture statelessness not through explicitly discriminatory laws and unequal treatment, but through manipulating ostensibly neutral criteria for nationality. The Article identifies three such criteria that are not traditionally considered “suspect” categories for the grant or denial of nationality: time, territory, and administrative practice. It also suggests doctrinal, policy, and strategic tools for identifying and responding to the types of statelessness that are not a collateral consequence of state failure or incompetence, but the outcome of state intentionality.

Privatization of functions that were traditionally considered sovereign has reached new heights. International lawyers have responded mostly by seeking to limit some of the consequences of that phenomenon, by, for example, ensuring accountability of states for outsourcing. International law has sometimes appeared agnostic, however, about the very legality of privatization. This Article explores a more radical take, namely the possibility that certain state functions could be seen as “inherently sovereign” under international law. International law can be understood this way, the Article argues, despite its general deferral to sovereignty (including the sovereignty to outsource), the fact that historically all kinds of functions that we have come to associate with the state have been exercised privately, and international law's own role in legitimizing privatization in our era.

When the skin of an Australian platypus was first taken to England in the 1700s, scientists thought it was a fake. It looked like someone had sewn a duck’s bill onto a beaver’s body; one scientist even took a pair of scissors to the skin looking for stitches. The animal had fur and was warm-blooded like a mammal, yet laid eggs and had webbed feet like a bird or a reptile. Scientists struggled to categorize this unusual creature. Was it a bird, a mammal, or a reptile? Or was it some strange hybrid of all three?

There is a new empirical turn in international legal scholarship. Building on decades of theoretical work in law and social science, a new generation of empirical studies is elaborating on how international law works in different contexts. The theoretical debate over whether international law matters is a stale one. What matters now is the study of the conditions under which international law is formed and has effects. International law is the product of specific forces and factors; it accomplishes its ends under particular conditions. The trend toward empirical study has expanded through the efforts of scholars in multiple disciplines, with legal scholars playing central roles independently and as collaborators in generating new empirical work. Legal scholars are also now pressed to be increasingly sophisticated consumers of this work. It is time to take stock and evaluate this new generation of multidisciplinary, multimethod empirical scholarship.