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Full-Text Articles in Law
Law In Regression? Impacts Of Quantitative Research On Law And Regulation, David C. Donald
Law In Regression? Impacts Of Quantitative Research On Law And Regulation, David C. Donald
David C. Donald
Quantitative research (QR) has undeniably improved the quality of law- and rulemaking, but it can also present risks for these activities. On the one hand, replacing anecdotal assertions regarding behavior or the effects of rules in an area to be regulated with objective, statistical evidence has advanced the quality of regulatory discourse. On the other hand, because the construction of such evidence often depends on bringing the complex realities of both human behavior and rules designed to govern it into simple, quantified variables, QR findings can at times camouflage complexity, masking real problems. Deceptively objective findings can in this way …
Law And Development: The Way Forward Or Just Stuck In The Same Place?, D. Daniel Sokol
Law And Development: The Way Forward Or Just Stuck In The Same Place?, D. Daniel Sokol
D. Daniel Sokol
This Essay does three things. First, it provides an overview of Law and Development issues. Second, it responds to other pieces in the symposium "The Future of Law and Development". Third, it suggests that to measure success, Law and Development needs clearer goals.
Globally Speaking - Honoring The Victims' Stories: Matsuda's Human Rights Praxis, Berta E. Hernández-Truyol
Globally Speaking - Honoring The Victims' Stories: Matsuda's Human Rights Praxis, Berta E. Hernández-Truyol
Berta E. Hernández-Truyol
Globally speaking, international law and the vast majority of domestic legal systems strive to protect the right to freedom of expression. The United States’ First Amendment provides an early historical protection of speech—a safeguard now embraced around the world. The extent of this protection, however, varies among states. The United States stands alone in excluding countervailing considerations of equality, dignitary, or privacy interests that would favor restrictions on speech. The gravamen of the argument supporting such American exceptionalism is that free expression is necessary in a democracy. Totalitarianism, the libertarian narrative goes, thrives on government control of information to the …
Addressing Early Marriage: Culturally Competent Practices And Romanian Roma (“Gypsy”) Communities, Judith Hale Reed
Addressing Early Marriage: Culturally Competent Practices And Romanian Roma (“Gypsy”) Communities, Judith Hale Reed
Judith A Hale Reed
Early marriage affects many communities around the world. Examples of commonly practiced early marriage can be found today in the U.S., India, Syria, and many other places. Although most countries have instituted minimum age laws for marriage, so that legal marriage can only occur after an age set by law, early marriage is still practiced for tradition, control, security, and other reasons. This article explores the harms of early marriage and the international instruments meant to defend against these harms in Part II. Part III reviews theoretical perspectives from legal anthropology and presents a case study of early marriage in …
"Unnatural Deaths," Criminal Sanctions, And Medical Quality Improvement In Japan, Robert B. Leflar
"Unnatural Deaths," Criminal Sanctions, And Medical Quality Improvement In Japan, Robert B. Leflar
Robert B Leflar
A worldwide awakening to the high incidence of preventable harm resulting from medical care, combined with pressure on hospitals and physicians from liability litigation, has turned international attention to the need for better structures to resolve medical disputes in a way that promotes medical safety and honesty toward patients. The civil justice system in the United States, in particular, is criticized as inefficient, arbitrary, and sometimes punitive. It is charged with undermining sound medical care by encouraging wasteful expenditures through defensive medicine; by driving information about medical mistakes underground where it escapes analysis, undercutting quality improvement efforts; and by forcing …
Reform Of The United States Health Care System: An Overview, Robert B. Leflar
Reform Of The United States Health Care System: An Overview, Robert B. Leflar
Robert B Leflar
This essay, written for readers unfamiliar with the details of American health law and policy, portrays the essential features of the battle for health reform in the United States and of the law that survived the battle: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). The essay summarizes key aspects of the U.S. health care system and how it compares in terms of costs and results with other advanced nations’systems. The political and legal conflicts leading up to and following PPACA’s enactment are described. The major features of the law, attempting to address problems of access to health care, quality, …
The Law Of Medical Misadventure In Japan, Robert B. Leflar
The Law Of Medical Misadventure In Japan, Robert B. Leflar
Robert B Leflar
This paper offers a comprehensive overview of Japanese law and practice relating to iatrogenic (medically-caused) injury, with comparisons to other nations’ medical law systems. The paper addresses criminal sanctions for Japanese physicians’ negligent and illegal acts; civil law principles of substantive law and related issues of procedure, practice, and liability insurance; and administrative measures including health ministry programs aimed at expanding and improving the quality of peer review within Japanese medicine, and a recently implemented no-fault compensation system for birth-related injuries. Among the paper’s findings are these. Criminal and civil actions increased rapidly after highly publicized medical error events at …
The Importance Of Comparative Law In Legal Education: United States Goals And Methods Of Legal Comparisons, Hugh J. Ault, Mary Ann Glendon
The Importance Of Comparative Law In Legal Education: United States Goals And Methods Of Legal Comparisons, Hugh J. Ault, Mary Ann Glendon
Hugh J. Ault
This Essay discusses the gradual changes occurring within legal education, which are finding wide acceptance in law schools throughout the United States. These changes include greater attention to other disciplines, primarily economics and behavioral sciences, and the contributions they make to a fuller understanding of the legal system. In addition, law schools are increasingly exploring the ways in which the law in textbooks may differ from the law in action. Nearly every law school, therefore, is seriously investigating the social and economic background of legal rules and their consequences through clinical legal education, which attempts to provide a real or …
Public And Private Justice: Redressing Health Care Harm In Japan, Robert B. Leflar
Public And Private Justice: Redressing Health Care Harm In Japan, Robert B. Leflar
Robert B Leflar
Japanese legal structures addressing health care-related deaths and injuries rely more on public law institutions and rules than do the common-law North American jurisdictions, where private law adjudication is predominant. This article explores four developments in 21st-century Japanese health care law. The first two are in the public law sphere: criminal prosecutions of health care personnel accused of medical errors, and a health ministry-sponsored “Model Project” to analyze medical-practice-associated deaths. The article addresses a private law innovation: health care divisions of trial courts in several metropolitan areas. Finally, the article introduces Japan’s new no-fault program for compensating birth-related obstetrical injuries. …
The Regulation Of Medical Malpractice In Japan, Robert Leflar
The Regulation Of Medical Malpractice In Japan, Robert Leflar
Robert B Leflar
How Japanese legal and social institutions handle medical errors is little known outside Japan. For almost all of the 20th century, a paternalistic paradigm prevailed. Characteristics of the legal environment affecting Japanese medicine included few attorneys handling medical cases, low litigation rates, long delays, predictable damage awards, and low-cost malpractice insurance. However, transparency principles have gained traction and public concern over medical errors has intensified. Recent legal developments include courts' adoption of a less deferential standard of informed consent; increases in the numbers of malpractice claims and of practicing attorneys; more efficient claims handling by specialist judges and speedier trials; …
Medical Error As Reportable Event, As Tort, As Crime: A Transpacific Comparison, Robert B. Leflar, Futoshi Iwata
Medical Error As Reportable Event, As Tort, As Crime: A Transpacific Comparison, Robert B. Leflar, Futoshi Iwata
Robert B Leflar
All nations seek to reduce the human toll from medical error, but variations in legal and institutional structures guide those efforts into different trajectories. This article compares legal and institutional responses to patient safety problems in the United States and Japan, addressing developments in civil malpractice law (including discoverability of internal hospital documents), administrative practice (including medical accident reporting systems), and - of particular significance in Japan - criminal law. In the U.S., battles over rules of malpractice litigation are fierce; tort law occupies center stage. The hospital accreditation process plays a critical role in medical quality control, and peer …
Informed Consent And Patients' Rights In Japan: 2001 Epilogue, Robert B. Leflar
Informed Consent And Patients' Rights In Japan: 2001 Epilogue, Robert B. Leflar
Robert B Leflar
Japan is on a steeper trajectory toward the incorporation of informed consent principles into medical practice than the “gradual transformation” observed in a 1996 article, Informed Consent and Patients’ Rights in Japan. Among the most significant recent developments from 1996 to 2001 have been these seven: (1) the 1997 enactment of the Organ Transplantation Law permitting the use of brain death criteria in limited circumstances in which informed consent is present; (2) the strengthening of patients’ rights in clinical drug trials; (3) the continued trend toward increasing disclosure to patients of cancer diagnoses; (4) initiatives by the health ministry toward …
Informed Consent And Patients' Rights In Japan, Robert B. Leflar
Informed Consent And Patients' Rights In Japan, Robert B. Leflar
Robert B Leflar
This article analyzes the development of the concept of informed consent in the context of the culture and economics of Japanese medicine, and locates that development within the framework of the nation's civil law system. Part II sketches the cultural foundations of medical paternalism in Japan; explores the economic incentives (many of them administratively directed) that have sustained physicians' traditional dominant roles; and describes the judiciary's hesitancy to challenge physicians' professional discretion. Part III delineates the forces testing the paternalist model: the undermining of the physicians' personal knowledge of their patients that accompanies the shift from neighborhood clinic to high-tech …