Law Commons^™

The Kids Are Not Alright: Leveraging Existing Health Law To Attack The Opioid Crisis Upstream, Yael Cannon

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The opioid crisis is now a nationwide epidemic, ravaging both rural and urban communities. The public health and economic consequences are staggering; recent estimates suggest the epidemic has contracted the U.S. labor market by over one million jobs and cost the nation billions of dollars. To tackle the crisis, scholars and health policy initiatives have focused primarily on downstream solutions designed to help those who are already in the throes of addiction. For example, the major initiative announced by the U.S. Surgeon General promotes the dissemination of naloxone, which helps save lives during opioid overdoses.

This Article argues that the …

Disclosing Deviations: Using Guidelines To Nudge And Empower Physician-Patient Decision Making, Melissa Ballengee Alexander

Faculty Articles

Americans fail to receive recommended care roughly half the time, reflecting poor decision making that threatens their health. This Article offers an innovative solution: require physicians to disclose clinical practice guideline recommendations to patients during informed consent. Behavioral economics suggest that insisting physicians and patients discuss guidelines, before deviating from them, could be surprisingly effective at nudging more rational care choices. At the same time, such disclosure should also educate and empower patients, serving autonomy.

Previous scholarship on unwarranted variances in care has focused primarily on malpractice reforms, largely ignoring the role of cognitive bias and the importance of patients …

Texas V United States: The Affordable Care Act Is Constitutional And Will Remain So, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

On December 14, 2018, in a widely reported decision, a federal judge in Texas ruled that the entire Affordable Care Act (ACA) is unconstitutional. The judge reasoned that since the ACA’s “individual mandate” is unconstitutional, the rest of the law cannot stand without it. However, the ACA will remain in place pending appeal, and it is highly unlikely that this ruling will stand.

Acting Differently: How Science On The Social Brain Can Inform Antidiscrimination Law, Susan Carle

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Legal scholars are becoming increasingly interested in how the literature on implicit bias helps explain illegal discrimination. However, these scholars have not yet mined all of the insights that science on the social brain can offer antidiscrimination law. That science, which researchers refer to as social neuroscience, involves a broadly interdisciplinary approach anchored in experimental natural science methodologies. Social neuroscience shows that the brain tends to evaluate others by distinguishing between "us" versus "them" on the basis of often insignificant characteristics, such as how people dress, sing, joke, or otherwise behave. Subtle behavioral markers signal social identity and group membership, …

Using The Ada's 'Integration Mandate' To Disrupt Mass Incarceration, Robert Dinerstein

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

As a result of the disability rights movement's fight for the development of community-based services, the percentage of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD) and mental illness living in institutions has significantly decreased over the last few decades. However, in part because of government failure to invest properly in community-based services required for a successful transition from institutions, individuals with disabilities are now dramatically overrepresented in jails and prisons. The Americans with Disabilities Act's (ADA) "integration mandate" -- a principle strengthened by the Supreme Court's 1999 Olmstead v. L.C. decision, entitling individuals with disabilities to receive services in the …