Friday September 17, 2021
12:30-1:30 p.m.
Online Zoom Meeting
Dear Colleagues:
Greetings, and I hope that you and yours are healthy and safe in this better but not quite better enough time for the world, our nation, our community, and Case Western Reserve University.
Our “Friday Lunch” continues as a Zoom-gathering. Classes are almost entirely in person, but the spread of the Delta variant and news that protection through vaccination appears to decline over time mean that dining together in a large group and enclosed space remains too risky. We hope to return to an in-person event when conditions appear safer, but for the moment we can hope for good discussions with colleagues who choose whether to be visible or not, on Zoom. Please e-mail me if you have suggestions about other approaches or how to improve what we are doing. My e-mail is joseph.white@case.edu.
This Week’s Program
This week’s topic anticipates a time when we will be able to gather in person. Pessimists may think there will be no “after” the pandemic, but they are wrong: Covid-19 may never go away, but it will not be a pandemic forever. When that happens, however, how will our world be different from our world before the virus changed and took so many lives?
It seems ironically timely to think about that this week, as the 20th anniversary of 9/11 has encouraged many commentaries about that event’s long-term effects. What might similar reflections on the pandemic say in ten or twenty years? We can be sure that different people, with different interests, would find different effects. But it seems worth thinking about in part for that reason: to elucidate different perspectives on both the consequences and meanings of the pandemic.
It also should be a good question to provoke discussion and share ideas. So I am pretty thrilled to have recruited two of our most interesting and accomplished colleagues to begin the discussion, and I hope people don’t mind my tossing in my two cents’ worth. I expect to comment about other examples of “lessons” being drawn – such as how the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam war shaped subsequent American politics. I might also say a bit about perceived “lessons” for health care and health policy, and how political divisions mean different people derive different lessons. Professor Mehlman can direct our attention to how responding to Covid-19 has involved many aspects of the legal system – including the coercive powers of public health law, questions of scope and location of practice, and liability among others. So how might the cases and conundrums arising from the pandemic shape health law going forward? Professor Turner has been considering the future of work, including research and teaching, and has written about how we jointly imagine our futures and understand our situations. How might the pandemic affect how we think about the future and indeed what kind of future we build?
I hope those suggestions give people things to think about before Friday, and that our brief presentations and the thoughts you bring can encourage a discussion that gives us all lots to think about afterwards.
Signing In
This semester’s discussions will begin at 12:30 p.m., the usual time. The meeting will be set up as from Noon to 2:00 p.m., so people are not all signing in at the same time and to allow for the discussion to run a bit long. Each week we will send out this newsletter with information about the topic. It will also include a link to register (for free) for the discussion. Every Monday the same information will be posted on our website: fridaylunch.case.edu.
If you register, you will automatically receive from the Zoom system the link to join the meeting. This week’s link for registration is:
https://cwru.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMlduuqqjosHdQMlbX-osSYpaqANXbcPkUu
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
Please e-mail padg@case.edu if you have questions about how the Zoom version of the Friday Lunch will work or any other suggestions. Or call at 216 368-2426 and we’ll try to get back to you. We are very pleased to be partnering this semester with the Siegal Lifelong Learning Program to share information about the discussions.
Best wishes for safety and security for you and yours,
Joe White
Luxenberg Family Professor of Public Policy and Director, Center for Policy Studies
About Our Guests
Maxwell J. Mehlman is Distinguished University Professor, Arthur E. Petersilge Professor of Law and Director of the Law-Medicine Center, Case Western Reserve University School of Law, and Professor of Biomedical Ethics, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. He received his JD from Yale Law School in 1975, and holds two bachelors degrees, one from Reed College and one from Oxford University, which he attended as a Rhodes Scholar. Prior to joining the Case Western Reserve faculty in 1984, Mehlman practiced law with Arnold & Porter in Washington, D.C., where he specialized in federal regulation of health care and medical technology.
Mark Turner is Institute Professor and Professor of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University. He is the founding director of the Cognitive Science Network and co-director of the Red Hen Lab. He has been a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Advanced Study of Durham University, and the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
Joe White joined the CWRU faculty in 2000, serving as Luxenberg Family Professor of Public Policy in the Department of Political Science. As director of the Center for Policy Studies, he also organizes the Public Affairs Discussion Group. He previously was Associate Professor in the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and before that Research Associate and then Senior Fellow in Governmental Studies at the Brookings Institution. He teaches a series of courses on public policy and U.S. politics, and his research involves both health care policy and federal budgeting. Dr. White is currently teaching The American Presidency, and he has published extensively about budget politics between President and Congress.
Schedule of Friday Lunch Upcoming Topics and Speakers:
September 24: Civilian Oversight of Police. With Ayesha Bell Hardaway, J.D., Associate Professor of Law and Deputy Monitor, Cleveland Police Monitoring Team.
October 1: What’s Happening in the Labor Market? With Bruce Fallick, Ph.D., Senior Vice President for Research, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
October 8: A Conversation with Scott Cowen, Ph.D. President Emeritus and Distinguished University Chair, Tulane University, and Interim President of Case Western Reserve University. (October 1, 2020 – June 30, 2021)
October 15: Germany’s New Government – and Europe’s New Leadership? With Mark K. Cassell, Ph.D., Professor of Political Science, Kent State University.
October 22: The Biden Administration’s Immigration Policies. With Aleksandar Cuic, J.D., Director of the Immigration Clinic, Milton A. Kramer Law Clinic Center, CWRU School of Law.
October 29: Continuity and Change in the Opioid Epidemic. With Lee Hoffer, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Anthropology and Professor of Psychiatry.
November 5: Redeveloping Buckeye/Woodhill. With Taryn Gress, MSSA, Strategic Director, and Debbie Wilber, Assistant Director, National Initiative on Mixed-Income Communities.
November 12: Can India Survive as a Secular Democracy? With Ananya DasGupta, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of History.
November 19: Hospital Boom and Busts. With J.B. Silvers, Ph.D., Associate Dean of Finance and Professor of Banking and Finance.
December 3: President Biden’s Trade Policy: Continuity and Change. With Juscelino Colares, J.D., Schott-van den Eynden Professor of Business Law. |
