Although this momentous legislation was passed over a year ago, the hard-fought bipartisan victory for workers’ rights is still relatively unknown. According to the Executive Office of the President, the new law “empowers survivors of sexual assault and sexual harassment by giving them a choice to go to court instead of being forced into arbitration” when bringing claims against their employer. 

Arbitration is a private, non-court method of dispute resolution in which the parties meet with a third-party mediator who hears the evidence and makes a binding decision.

According to a 2018 study by the Economic Policy Institute, 50.4% of U.S. nonunion private sector employers require their employees to sign mandatory arbitration agreements, which “bar access to the courts for all types of legal claims, including employment discrimination and sexual harassment claims.”  Another 3.5% of employers “adopt arbitration procedures simply by announcing that these procedures have been incorporated into the organization’s employment policies.”  Employees are sometimes unaware that they are bound by these agreements until it’s time to bring a claim against their employer.

Qualified immunity has faced backlash in recent years following multiple widely publicized deaths of Black civilians at the hands of police. This legal doctrine has been used as a defense in cases ranging from the tazing of a disturbed man hospitalized with pneumonia who was resisting medical care to a truly bizarre case where a federal court granted qualified immunity to officers accused of stealing over $225,000 of “property seized pursuant to a warrant.”

Qualified immunity is an attempt to protect government employees (including police officers) from ambiguities in the law, but it begins to look more like a legal loophole as we dig into how it’s being applied. Under this doctrine, government officials “generally are shielded from liability for civil damages” for actions taken in the performance of their duties if a court decides that their alleged actions were not a violation of the plaintiff’s “clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known” at the time.

The rise in opioid-related overdose deaths is one of the greatest public health crises in modern American history. Between 1999 and 2019, opioid overdoses caused nearly 500,000 deaths in the United States. This crisis can be seen in three concurrent trends over the same time period: a more than 6-fold increase in the number of opioid overdose deaths, a more than 7-fold increase in the number of deaths per year from heroin overdose, and an almost 50-fold increase in the number of overdose deaths per year from synthetic opioids (including fentanyl but not including methadone).

How did we get here?

The Fraudulent Marketing Behind OxyContin

In 1995, Purdue Pharma received FDA approval for its drug OxyContin, a controlled-release pain reliever. Focus groups which Purdue used for market research showed that “physicians had great reservations about prescribing OxyContin” because of its potential for addiction and abuse. These same focus groups revealed to Purdue “that physicians wanted a long lasting pain reliever that was less addictive and less subject to abuse and diversion."

The use of body-worn cameras (BWC) has the potential to aid police reform, but the NYPD’s BWC program shows that turning the cameras on is not enough. More than 6 years after this program began, gaining access to footage continues to be an obstacle for civilians bringing claims against the police.

The NYPD began its rollout of BWCs in 2017. The NYPD reports that over 24,000 of its members are equipped with a BWC, including “all Police Officers, Detectives, Sergeants and Lieutenants regularly assigned to perform patrol duties throughout the city.”

The New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB), an independent agency empowered to investigate "complaints against New York City police officers alleging the use of excessive or unnecessary force, abuse of authority, discourtesy, or the use of offensive language,” uses BWC footage to resolve complaints against officers. 

However, the CCRB has had long-standing issues obtaining BWC footage from the NYPD.  

A Slow Start, Plagued with Delays and “False Negatives”

Fair elections should never be taken for granted. It’s critical that we continuously scrutinize and improve the electoral process, but baseless and self-serving allegations of election fraud have drowned out the legitimate discussions about election integrity and electoral reform.

After alleging voter fraud in 2016, Trump had an opportunity to address those allegations when he took office. One attempt was a short-lived commission that was sued by one of its members for withholding information and terminated by President Trump less than two weeks after being ordered to provide that information.

The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity (PACEI) was established in 2017 after Trump signed an executive order directing the new commission to submit a report that identifies "those vulnerabilities in voting systems and practices used for Federal elections that could lead to improper voter registrations and improper voting, including fraudulent voter registrations and fraudulent voting."