Law Commons^™

The Law Of Genetic Privacy: Applications, Implications, And Limitations, Ellen Wright Clayton, Barbara J. Evans, James W. Hazel, Mark A. Rothstein

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Recent advances in technology have significantly improved the accuracy of genetic testing and analysis, and substantially reduced its cost, resulting in a dramatic increase in the amount of genetic information generated, analysed, shared, and stored by diverse individuals and entities. Given the diversity of actors and their interests, coupled with the wide variety of ways genetic data are held, it has been difficult to develop broadly applicable legal principles for genetic privacy. This article examines the current landscape of genetic privacy to identify the roles that the law does or should play, with a focus on federal statutes and regulations, …

Dangerousness, Disability, And Dna, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Article honors three of Professor Arnold Loewy's articles. The first, published over thirty years ago, is entitled Culpability, Dangerousness, and Harm: Balancing the Factors on Which Our Criminal Law is Predicated,' and the second is his 2009 article, The Two Faces of Insanity. In addition to commenting on these two articles about substantive criminal law, I can't resist also saying something about one of Professor Loewy's procedural pieces, A Proposal for the Universal Collection of DNA, published in 2015.

A theme that unites all three of these articles is that they appear to be quite radical, at least on …

Is It Time For A Universal Genetic Forensic Database?, J. W. Hazel, Ellen Wright Clayton, B. A. Malin, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The ethical objections to mandating forensic profiling of newborns and/or compelling every citizen or visitor to submit to a buccal swab or to spit in a cup when they have done nothing wrong are not trivial. But newborns are already subject to compulsory medical screening, and people coming from foreign countries to the United States already submit to fingerprinting. It is also worth noting that concerns about coercion or invasions of privacy did not give pause to legislatures (or, for that matter, even the European Court) when authorizing compelled DNA sampling from arrestees, who should not forfeit genetic privacy interests …

Policing As Administration, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Police agencies should be governed by the same administrative principles that govern other agencies. This simple precept would have significant implications for regulation of police work, in particular the type of suspicionless, group searches and seizures that have been the subject of the Supreme Court's special needs jurisprudence (practices that this Article calls "panvasive"). Under administrative law principles, when police agencies create statute-like policies that are aimed at largely innocent categories of actors-as they do when administering roadblocks, inspection regimes, drug testing programs, DNA sampling programs, and data collection-they should have to engage in notice-and-comment rulemaking or a similar democratically …

Patients And Biobanks, Ellen Wright Clayton

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The question about the privacy of medical information can be stated simply: To what extent can and should patients control what the medical record contains and who has access to it and for what purposes? Patients often have apparently conflicting views on this subject. On the one hand, we, as patients, say that we prize privacy and that we fear that information will be used to harm us. On the other hand, we value the benefits that come from improved communication among providers, such as having our visits covered by third party payers and advances in medical science, which often …

Behavioral Genetics And Crime, In Context, Owen D. Jones

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Article provides an introduction to some of the key issues at the intersection of behavioral genetics and crime.

It provides, among other things, an overview of the emerging points of consensus, scientifically, on what behavioral genetics can and cannot tell us about criminal behavior. It also discusses a variety of important implications (as well as complexities) of attempting to use insights of behavioral genetics in legal contexts.