Health Law and Policy Commons^™

Autism And Access To Healthcare, Amanda Forbes

Mitchell Hamline Law Journal of Public Policy and Practice

No abstract provided.

Reevaluating Regional Law Reform Strategies After Dobbs, Jamie Abrams

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This article studies the triad of 2016 social media campaigns known as “#AskDr.Kasich,” “#askbevinaboutmyvag,” and “#PeriodsforPence.” While these campaigns, each located in the regional mid-South, were motivated by restrictive state abortion bills, they uniquely positioned menstruation and women’s bodies at the center of their activism—not abortion alone. They leveraged, as a political fault line, the contradiction of these states’ governors’ perceived disgust relating to basic women’s reproductive health, relative to their patriarchal assuredness in regulating and controlling women’s bodies.

In so doing, they tapped into meaningful disruptions in the geographies, religiosities, and masculinities of abortion politics. These campaigns achieved regional …

Addressing Stigma And False Beliefs About Mental Health: A New Direction For Mental Health Parity Advocacy, Claire Sontheimer, Michael Ulrich

Faculty Scholarship

Despite laws designed to protect mental health and substance use parity in the United States, real parity remains an aspiration. Under the current system, insurance companies use multiple tactics to deny coverage for or delay the provision of mental health and substance use disorder (MH/SUD) treatment. The difficulty of enforcing parity creates a barrier to achieving the goal of accessible behavioral health services. Rather than a continued effort to legislate our way out of this conundrum, it may be useful to look further upstream. Critical impediments to achieving such parity include the basic attitudes and beliefs about mental and behavioral …

Maternity Rights: A Comparative View Of Mexico And The United States, Roberto Rosas

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

Women play a large role in the workplace and require additional protection during pregnancy, childbirth, and while raising children. This article compares how Mexico and the United States have approached the issue of maternity rights and benefits. First, Mexico provides eighty-four days of paid leave to mothers, while the United States provides unpaid leave for up to twelve weeks. Second, Mexico allows two thirty-minute breaks a day for breastfeeding, while the United States allows a reasonable amount of time per day to breastfeed. Third, Mexico provides childcare to most federal employees, while the United States provides daycares to a small …

How Medicalization Of Civil Rights Could Disappoint, Allison K. Hoffman

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay reflects on Craig Konnoth’s recent Article, Medicalization and the New Civil Rights, which is a carefully crafted and thought-provoking description of the refashioning of civil rights claims into medical rights frameworks. He compellingly threads together many intellectual traditions—from antidiscrimination law to disability law to health law—to illustrate the pervasiveness of the phenomenon that he describes and why it might be productive as a tool to advance civil rights.

This response, however, offers several reasons why medicalization may not cure all that ails civil rights litigation’s pains and elaborates on the potential risks of overinvesting in medical rights-seeking. …

Private Schools' Role And Rights In Setting Vaccination Policy: A Constitutional And Statutory Puzzle, Hillel Y. Levin

Scholarly Works

Measles and other vaccine-preventable childhood diseases are making a comeback, as a growing number of parents are electing not to vaccinate their children. May private schools refuse admission to these students? This deceptively simple question raises complex issues of First Amendment law and statutory interpretation, and it also has implications for other current hot-button issues in constitutional law, including whether private schools may discriminate against LGBTQ students. This Article is the first to address the issue of private schools’ rights to exclude unvaccinated children. It finds that the answer is “it depends.” It also offers a model law that states …

Against The ‘Safety Net’, Matthew Lawrence

Matthew B. Lawrence

Video: Nsu Law Health Care Policy Discussion, James Hodge Jr.

NSU Law Seminar Series

Florida regularly has been ground zero for election news during the 21st century. During elections in Florida, both individual and public health issues resonate strongly, because of the state’s demographics and history. Health care policy is certain to be a key issue in the upcoming election season.

To educate voters about a slate of core, national health law and public health law election issues, NSU Law will host national expert James G. Hodge, Jr., the Peter Kiewit Foundation Professor of Law at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, Arizona State University.

Do Bans Help Modern Public Health?, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

A century ago, the 18th Amendment to the United States Constitution went into effect, banning the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors.” Fourteen years after its ratification, the 18th Amendment was repealed by the 21st Amendment. What did Prohibition teach us about banning hazardous products like alcohol, tobacco, or e-cigarettes?

Due Process Supreme Court Appellate Division Second Department

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Just Care: A Relational Approach To Autonomy And Decision Making Of Parents Committed To Religious Or Indigenous Traditional Practices, Tu-Quynh Trinh

LLM Theses

Hamilton Health Sciences Corp. v. D.H. and B. (R.) v. Children’s Aid Society of Metropolitan Toronto tell important stories about people and relationships—and about parenthood; autonomy; religious believers and cultural communities; and the role of the state in family, culture, and religion. Their narratives were influenced by liberalism and emphasize a degree of individualism that is incongruous given the subject matter of parent child relationships and their place within communities and the law. This thesis explores the application of relational theory and the integrated principles of justice and care to these issues. Ultimately, the stories these judicial opinions tell help …

Supervised Injection Facilities: Legal And Policy Reforms, Lawrence O. Gostin, James G. Hodge, Chelsea L. Gulinson

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that more than 70 000 deaths from drug overdoses occurred in 2017, including prescription and illicit opioids, representing a 6-fold increase since 1999. Innovative harm-reduction solutions are imperative. Supervised injection facilities (SIFs) create safe places for drug injection, including overdose prevention, counseling, and treatment referral services. Supervised injection facilities neither provide illicit drugs nor do their personnel inject users. Supervised injection facilities are effective in reducing drug-related mortality, morbidity, and needle-borne infections. Yet their lawfulness remains uncertain. The Department of Justice (DOJ) recently threatened criminal prosecution for SIF operators, medical personnel, …

Living, Aging, And Dying In Healthy And Just Societies: Life Lessons From My Father, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

My father passed away at 102 years old. He lived, aged, and died well. But that is rare in the United States and globally. The World Health Organization defines palliative care “throughout the life course” as improving quality of life for patients and families and relieving pain and suffering, while paying special attention to physical, psychosocial, and spiritual functioning. That’s the global vision, but then there’s the reality. Palliative care, in practice, has been little more than pain relief at life’s end—and in much of the world, not even that.

We need to reimagine palliation, embracing a communal or relational …

Informed Consent And The Role Of The Treating Physician, Eric Feldman, Holly Fernandez Lynch, Steven Joffe

All Faculty Scholarship

In the century since Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo famously declared that “[e]very human being of adult years and sound mind has a right to determine what shall be done with his own body,” informed consent has become a central feature of American medical practice. In an increasingly team-based and technology-driven system, however, who is — or ought to be — responsible for obtaining a patient’s consent? Must the treating physician personally provide all the necessary disclosures, or can the consent process, like other aspects of modern medicine, take advantage of specialization and division of labor? Analysis of Shinal v. Toms, …

Reforming Regenerative Medicine Regulation, Sarah Duranske

Georgia State University Law Review

Regenerative medicine is defined as the branch of medicine that develops methods to regrow, repair, or replace damaged or diseased cells or tissues. It includes a variety of approaches, such as transplanting cells to promote healing, editing genes in cells to attack cancer, and even building organs from biological materials. Regulating regenerative medicine therapies is no easy task. Finding a balance between competing interests–enabling timely access for needy patients while simultaneously ensuring a positive benefit/risk profile and promoting the development of beneficial innovations–is hard enough at any given point in time. But add in constantly advancing scientific knowledge and increasing …

Bundling Justice: Medicaid's Support For Housing, Mary Crossley

Articles

Achieving safe and stable housing presents a profound and ongoing challenge for many people living in poverty. The challenges include housing that is substandard or unaffordable and continuing risks of eviction. For a growing number, these challenges prove too much, and they become homeless. In addition, housing-related challenges that are part of daily life for many poor people can influence their physical and mental health. Increased attention to the health impacts of inadequate, insecure, and unaffordable housing has prompted some – including public health experts, physicians, and sociologists studying housing – to urge that housing issues, and homelessness in particular, …

Reproductive Selection Bias, Lauren R. Roth

Scholarly Works

Decades after the advent of assisted reproductive technology (ART) that allows prospective parents to deselect embryos with grave genetic illnesses – a procedure called preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) – it remains a tool largely of upper class whites. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, I argue that the time has come to focus on access in this area of reproductive rights. The next logical step is to rebut the presumption that reproductive liberty is only a negative right that prevents government interference with decisions about whether and how to procreate or not …

3d Printing And Healthcare: Will Laws, Lawyers, And Companies Stand In The Way Of Patient Care?, Evan R. Youngstrom

Evan R. Youngstrom

Today, our society is on a precipice of significant advancement in healthcare because 3D printing will usher in the next generation of medicine. The next generation will be driven by customization, which will allow doctors to replace limbs and individualize drugs. However, the next generation will be without large pharmaceutical companies and their justifications for strong intellectual property rights. However, the current patent system (which is underpinned by a social tradeoff made from property incentives) is not flexible enough to cope with 3D printing’s rapid development. Very soon, the social tradeoff will no longer benefit society, so it must be …

Disrupting The Path From Childhood Trauma To Juvenile Justice: An Upstream Health And Justice Approach, Yael Cannon, Andrew Hsi

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

A groundbreaking public health study funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Kaiser Foundation found astoundingly high rates of childhood trauma, including experiences like abuse, neglect, parental substance abuse, mental illness, and incarceration. Hundreds of follow-up studies have revealed that multiple traumatic adverse childhood experiences (or “ACEs”) make it far more likely that a person will have poor mental health outcomes in adulthood, such as higher rates of depression, anxiety, suicide attempts, and substance abuse. Interestingly, the original ACE Study examined a largely middle-class adult population living in San Diego, but subsequent follow-up studies …

From Patient Rights To Health Justice, Lindsay Wiley

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Models emphasizing professional autonomy, patient rights, market power, and health consumerism are no longer adequate to address the increasingly social, collective nature of health law institutions, instruments, and norms. What is needed is a new model that expressly recognizes the public-alongside the patient, the provider, and the payer-as an important stakeholder and active participant in decisions about medical treatment, health care coverage, and allocation of scarce resources. In a previous article, the author looked to the environmental justice, reproductive justice, and food justice movements for inspiration in developing a "health justice" approach to eliminating social disparities in health. This Article …

From Patient Rights To Health Justice.Pdf, Lindsay Wiley

Lindsay Wiley

Toward A Structural Theory Of Implicit Racial And Ethnic Bias In Health Care, Dayna Bowen Matthew

Publications

No abstract provided.

Invalid Testimony: Disability And Voice In The Criminal Procedure (Co-Authored With Osnat Ein-Dor) (Hebrew), Sagit Mor

Sagit Mor

This Article discuses the sociolegal reality that people with developmental and mental disabilities experience in their interaction with the criminal justice system and the challenges that the criminal system faces when it comes to deal with a case which involves a disabled person. It maintains that the barriers that disabled people face in criminal proceedings do not exist only in pre-trial stages, but also during the trial itself, since courts, too, are impacted by exclusionary legal rules and by cognitive schemas that express negative stereotypes. In 2005 a new law was introduced in Israel: Investigation and Testimony Proceedings (Accommodations for …

Blood Transfusions, Jehovah’S Witnesses, And The American Patients’ Rights Movement, Charles H. Baron

Charles H. Baron

The litigation to protect Jehovah’s Witnesses from unwanted blood transfusions, which their theology considers a violation of the biblical prohibition against drinking blood, has produced important changes in both the right to refuse treatment and in the preferred treatment methods of all patients. This article traces the evolution of the rights of competent medical patients in the United States to refuse medical treatment. It also discusses the impact this litigation has had on the medical community’s realization that blood transfusions were neither as safe nor as medically necessary as medical culture posited.

Medical Malpractice Reform Measures And Their Effects, Robert Leflar

Robert B Leflar

New rules and methods for medical injury dispute resolution have been launched in New Hampshire and New York, and demonstration projects are underway elsewhere. This article describes major medical malpractice reforms undertaken and proposed in recent years. Reforms are classified as (1) liability-limiting initiatives favoring health-care providers; (2) procedural innovations promoted as improving dispute resolution processes, such as patient compensation funds, “sorry” laws, disclosure and early offer laws, health courts, and safe harbor laws; and (3) major conceptual reforms to move liability away from physicians to hospitals or administrative no-fault compensation systems. Empirical evidence about the practical effects of already-implemented …

"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 …

From Absence To Presence: A Critique Of Intersex Surgeries (Co-Authored With Maayan Sudai And Or Shai) (Hebrew), Sagit Mor

Sagit Mor

This is the first Article in Israeli legal scholarship that addresses the rights of intersex persons, who were born with "a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t seemto fit the typical definitions of female or male" (INSA). The common practice in most Western countries today is to operate intersex infants in order to assign them to one of the “conventional” sexes: either male or female. The Article lays the foundations for an intersex critique of law that supports the rights of intersex persons and lays out the ground for the critique of the current legal arrangement and the design of …

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, …

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, …

Equal Rights For Disabled People In Employment Law – A Critical Assessment (Hebrew), Sagit Mor

Sagit Mor

This article presents a pioneering research project, which seeks to explore whether and to what extent the Equal Rights for People with Disability Law, 1998, had an impact on courts' rulings on matters related to disability employment discrimination. In particular, it seeks to examine (1) whether a consistent and instructive legal doctrine has evolved, one that reflects the principles that guided the framers of the legislation, and (2) whether the legal discourse on disability has changed. The article presents the emerging theory of disability legal studies and its unique and original contribution to legal scholarship. Disability legal studies seeks to …