Law Commons^™

Towards Racial Justice: The Role Of Medical-Legal Partnerships, Medha D. Makhlouf

Faculty Scholarly Works

Medical-legal partnerships (MLPs) integrate knowledge and practices from law and health care in pursuit of health equity. However, the MLP movement has not reached its full potential to address racial health inequities, in part because its original framing was not explicitly race conscious. This article aims to stimulate discussion of the role of MLPs in racial justice. It calls for MLPs to name racism as a social determinant of health and to examine how racism may operate in the field. This work sets the stage for the next step: operationalizing racial justice in the MLP model, research, and practice.

Immigration Reforms As Health Policy, Medha D. Makhlouf, Patrick J. Glen

Faculty Scholarly Works

The 2020 election, uniting control of the political branches in the Democratic party, opened up a realistic possibility of immigration reform. Reform of the immigration system is long overdue, but in pursuing such reform, Congress should cast a broad net and recognize the health policies embedded in immigration laws. Some immigration laws undermine health policies designed to improve individual and population health. For example, immigration inadmissibility and deportability laws that chill noncitizens from enrolling in health-promoting public benefits contribute to health inequities in immigrant communities that spill over into the broader population—a fact highlighted by the still-raging COVID-19 pandemic. Restrictions …

Educating Antiracist Lawyers: The Race And The Equal Protection Of The Laws Program At Dickinson Law, Dermot M. Groome

Faculty Scholarly Works

The year 2020 has forced us, as a nation, to recognize painful realities about systemic racism in our country and our legal system. The fallacies in our founding documents and the vestiges of our slave past are so woven into our national culture that they became hard to see except for those who suffered their daily indignities, hardships, and fears. As legal educators, we must face the role we have played in helping build the machinery of structural racism by supplying generation after generation of those who maintain that machinery and prosper within it. In this critical moment of our …

Health Care Sanctuaries, Medha D. Makhlouf

Faculty Scholarly Works

It is increasingly common for noncitizens living in the United States to avoid seeing a doctor or enrolling in publicly funded health programs because they fear surveillance by immigration authorities. This is the consequence of a decades-long shift in the locus of immigration enforcement activities from the border to the interior, as well as a recent period of heightened immigration enforcement. These fears persist because the law incompletely constrains immigration surveillance in health care.

This Article argues that immigration surveillance in health care is a poor choice of resource allocation for immigration enforcement because it has severe consequences for health …

A Pathway To Health Care Citizenship For Daca Beneficiaries, Medha D. Makhlouf, Patrick J. Glen

Faculty Scholarly Works

Since 2012, beneficiaries of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) have enjoyed a certain normalization, however tenuous, of their status in the United States: they can legally work, their removal proceedings are deferred, and they cease to accrue unlawful presence. Regarding subsidized health coverage, however, DACA beneficiaries remain on the outside looking in. Although other deferred action beneficiaries are eligible for benefits through Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and the Affordable Care Act, the Obama Administration specifically excluded DACA beneficiaries. This decision undermines DACA’s goal of legitimizing beneficiaries’ presence in the United States. From a health policy perspective, it …

In Search Of An Enforceabe Medical Malpractice Exculpatory Agreement: Introducing Confidential Contracts As A Solution To The Doctor-Patient Relationship Problem, Matthew J.B. Lawrence

Faculty Scholarly Works

Scholars have argued that the malpractice system would be better off if patients had the option of waiving the right to sue for malpractice in exchange for a lower fee. Some doctors have tried to follow this advice by having their patients sign medical malpractice exculpatory agreements, but courts usually have refused to enforce these agreements, invoking a void-for-public-policy rationale. This Note argues that a doctor could maximize the odds that a court would enforce her medical malpractice exculpatory agreement by somehow ensuring that she will never find out whether her patient decided to sign. A case study of the …