Law Commons^™

Adolescent Medical Decisionmaking Rights: Reconciling Medicine And Law, Doriane Lambelet Coleman, Philip M. Rosoff

Faculty Scholarship

Dennis Lindberg came into his aunt’s care when he was in the 4th grade because his parents struggled with drug addiction and could not provide for him. At thirteen, he was baptized in his aunt’s faith as a Jehovah’s Witness. Just days after he turned fourteen, on November 6, he was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

The prognosis was that Dennis had a 75% chance of cure with standard oncology treatment. Consistent with the requirements of his new faith, however, Dennis told his doctors, “I do not want to be treated if the requirement is that I would have to …

Does Medical Malpractice Law Improve Health Care Quality?, Michael D. Frakes, Anupam B. Jena

Faculty Scholarship

Despite the fundamental role of deterrence in justifying a system of medical malpractice law, surprisingly little evidence has been put forth to date bearing on the relationship between medical liability forces on the one hand and medical errors and health care quality on the other. In this paper, we estimate this relationship using clinically validated measures of health care treatment quality constructed using data from the 1979 to 2005 National Hospital Discharge Surveys and the 1987 to 2008 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System records. Drawing upon traditional, remedy-centric tort reforms — e.g., damage caps — we estimate that the current …

Religiously-Motivated Medical Neglect: A Response To Professors Levin, Jacobs, And Arora, Doriane Lambelet Coleman

Faculty Scholarship

This Response to Professors Levin, Jacobs, and Arora’s article To Accommodate or Not to Accommodate: (When) Should the State Regulate Religion to Protect the Rights of Children and Third Parties? focuses on their claim that the law governing religious exemptions to medical neglect is messy, unprincipled, and in need of reform, including because it violates the Establishment Clause. I disagree with this assessment and provide support for my position. Specifically, I summarize and assess the current state of this law and its foundation in the perennial tussle between parental rights and state authority to make decisions for and about the …

Do Physicians Respond To Liability Standards?, Michael D. Frakes, Matthew Frank, Seth Seabury

Faculty Scholarship

In this paper, we explore the sensitivity in the clinical decisions of physicians to the standards of care expected of them under the law, drawing on the abandonment by states over time of rules holding physicians to standards determined by local customs and the contemporaneous adoption of national-standard rules. Using data on broad rates of surgical interventions at the county-by-year level from the Area Resource File, we find that local surgery rates converge towards national surgery rates upon the adoption of national-standard rules. Moreover, we find that these effects are more pronounced among rural counties.

Testing The Boundaries Of Family Privacy: The Special Case Of Pediatric Sibling Transplants, Doriane Lambelet Coleman

Faculty Scholarship

A six-year-old girl suffers third-degree burns over eighty percent of her body. Her chance of survival with minimal scarring is said to depend on her identical twin sister’s availability as an organ source. There are other transplant options—including the parents—but because the twins’ skin is “equivalent,” a “sibling transplant” is likely to result in a better medical and aesthetic outcome for the burned twin. Her doctor thus proposes to harvest her healthy sister’s skin on “her backside from her bra line down to the bottom of her buttocks or possibly her thighs.” This procedure would be repeated up to three …

Brief Of Professors Of Law As Amici Curiae In Support Of Appellants, Neil Vidmar, David Zevan

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Defensive Medicine And Obstetric Practices, Michael D. Frakes

Faculty Scholarship

Using data on physician behavior from the 1979–2005 National Hospital Discharge Surveys (NHDS), I estimate the relationship between malpractice pressure, as identified by the adoption of non-economic damage caps and related tort reforms, and certain decisions faced by obstetricians during the delivery of a child. The NHDS data, supplemented with restricted geographic identifiers, provides inpatient discharge records from a broad enough span of states and covering a long enough period of time to allow for a defensive medicine analysis that draws on an extensive set of variations in relevant tort laws. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, I find no evidence …

Juries And Medical Malpractice Claims: Empirical Facts Versus Myths, Neil Vidmar

Faculty Scholarship

Juries in medical malpractice trials are viewed as incompetent, anti-doctor, irresponsible in awarding damages to patients, and casting a threatening shadow over the settlement process. Several decades of systematic empirical research yields little support for these claims. This article summarizes those findings. Doctors win about three cases of four that go to trial. Juries are skeptical about inflated claims. Jury verdicts on negligence are roughly similar to assessments made by medical experts and judges. Damage awards tend to correlate positively with the severity of injury. There are defensible reasons for large damage awards. Moreover, the largest awards are typically settled …

Pathways Across The Valley Of Death: Novel Intellectual Property Strategies For Accelerated Drug Discovery, Arti K. Rai, Jerome H. Reichman, Paul F. Uhlir, Colin Crossman

Faculty Scholarship

Drug discovery is stagnating. Government agencies, industry analysts, and industry scientists have all noted that, despite significant increases in pharmaceutical R&D funding, the production of fundamentally new drugs - particularly drugs that work on new biological pathways and proteins - remains disappointingly low. To some extent, pharmaceutical firms are already embracing the prescription of new, more collaborative R&D organizational models suggested by industry analysts. In this Article, we build on collaborative strategies that firms are already employing by proposing a novel public-private collaboration that would help move upstream academic research across the valley of death that separates upstream research from …

The Law School Clinic As A Partner In A Medical-Legal Partnership, Jane R. Wettach

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Following The Script: An Empirical Analysis Of Court-Ordered Mediation Of Medical Malpractice Cases, Thomas B. Metzloff, Ralph A. Peeples, Catherine T. Harris

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

“Judicial Hellholes:” Medical Malpractice Claims, Verdicts, And The “Doctor Exodus” In Illinois, Neil Vidmar, Kara Mackillop

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Medical Malpractice And The Tort System In Illinois (Report To The Illinois State Bar Association, May 2005), Neil Vidmar

Faculty Scholarship

A report to the Illinois State Bar Association of a study examining the incidence, frequency, size of verdicts and other aspects of the medical malpractice system in Illinois. The study looked at statewide data where available, concentrating on Cook and DuPage counties, and Madison and St. Clair counties. The study concludes that the Illinois tort system does not appear to be the cause of the undisputed fact that doctors' liability insurance premiums showed dramatic rises.

An Antidote To Anecdotes, Neil Vidmar

Faculty Scholarship

Reviewing, Frank A. Sloan, et al., Suing for Medical Malpractice (1993)

An Overview Of Health Law Research And An Annotated Bibliography, Richard A. Danner, Claire M. Germain

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Doctors On Trial: Steve Biko, Medical Ethics, And The Courts, Lawrence G. Baxter

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.