Law Commons^™

Beneficial And Unusual Punishment: An Argument In Support Of Prisoner Participation In Clinical Trials, Sharona Hoffman

Faculty Publications

Currently, approximately 1.8 million people are incarcerated in the United States at any given time. A disproportionately large percentage of the prisoner population has serious illnesses, such as AIDS and tuberculosis. Prisoners most often, however, are barred from participation in clinical trials, even when conventional therapy has failed, and experimental treatment might provide them with their only hope of survival.

Much of the reluctance to include prisoners in biomedical research is based on history. In the past, prisoners have been severely abused and even tortured in medical studies conducted in the Nazi death camps, Japanese prisoner camps, and correctional facilities …

More Sorry Than Safe: Assessing The Precautionary Principle And The Proposed International Biosafety Protocol, Jonathan H. Adler

Faculty Publications

Part I of this paper provides a brief overview of the development of biotechnology, its regulation and its use, with a particular emphasis on agricultural biotechnology. Part II outlines the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, which provides an international legal framework for a biosafety protocol and summarizes the results of recent protocol negotiations, such as those conducted in Cartagena, Colombia in February 1999, which continued in Montreal in January 2000. Part III explains why the proposed protocol embodies a variant of the precautionary principle and why such policies may do more harm than good. This paper concludes with some …