Health Law and Policy Commons^™

Lost In The Shuffle: How Health And Disability Laws Hurt Disordered Gamblers, Stacey A. Tovino

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Gambling disorder is not a legally sympathetic health condition. Health insurance policies and plans have long excluded treatment for gambling disorder from health insurance coverage. Individuals with gambling disorder who seek disability income insurance benefits from public and private disability income insurers also tend not to be successful in their claims. In addition, federal and state antidiscrimination laws currently exclude individuals with gambling disorder from disability discrimination protections. This Article is the first law review article to challenge the legal treatment of individuals with gambling disorder by showing how health insurance and antidiscrimination laws hurt problem gamblers. Using neuroscience, economics, …

Remarks: Neuroscience, Gender, And The Law, Stacey A. Tovino

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These remarks, delivered at the Neuroscience, Law, and Government Symposium held at the University of Akron School of Law in 2009, explore how stakeholders are using advances in the neuroscience of three gender-specific and gender-prevalent conditions (the postpartum mood disorders, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, and eating disorders) to secure health care benefits under group health plans and individual health insurance policies and to push for the inclusion of these conditions in mental health parity legislation.

The Impact Of Neuroscience On Health Law, Stacey A. Tovino

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Advances in neuroscience have implications for criminal law as well as civil and regulatory law, including health, disability, and benefit law. The role of the behavioral and brain sciences in health insurance claims, the mental health parity debate, and disability proceedings is examined.

Book Review: "Law And The Brain", Stacey A. Tovino

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Edited by Semir Zeki and Oliver Goodenough, Law and the Brain is a wonderful collection of fourteen essays that examine a range of topics at the intersection of law and neurobiology. Although neurotransdiscipline texts, collections, and journal symposia abound, what makes Law and the Brain so special is its focus on the special challenges raised by the neuroscience-policy interface. These challenges flow from basic differences in the orientation of the brain and brain science, on the one hand, and the law on the other hand.

Functional Neuroimaging And The Law: Trends And Directions For Future Scholarship, Stacey A. Tovino

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Under the umbrella of the burgeoning neurotransdisciplines, scholars are using the principles and research methodologies of their primary and secondary fields to examine developments in neuroimaging, neuromodulation, and psychopharmacology. The path for advanced scholarship at the intersection of law and neuroscience may clear if work across the disciplines is collected and reviewed and outstanding and debated issues are identified and clarified. In this article, I organize, examine and refine a narrow class of burgeoning neurotransdiscipline scholarship; that is, scholarship at the interface of law and functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Imaging Body Structure And Mapping Brain Function: A Historical Approach, Stacey A. Tovino

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Now in its second decade, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) localizes changes in blood oxygenation that occur in the brain when an individual performs a mental task. Physicians and scientists use fMRI not only to map sensory, motor, and cognitive functions, but also to study the neural correlates of a range of sensitive and potentially stigmatizing conditions, behaviors, and characteristics. Poised to move outside the traditional clinical and research contexts, fMRI raises a number of ethical, legal, and social issues that are being explored within a burgeoning neuroethics literature. In this Article, I place these issues in their proper historical …

Book Review: "Hardwired Behavior: What Neuroscience Reveals About Morality", Stacey A. Tovino

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The field of neuroethics has been described as an amalgamation of two branches of inquiry: the ethics of neuroscience and the neuroscience of ethics. The ethics of neuroscience, which has received considerable attention over the past three to four years, is concerned with the ethical principles that should guide brain research and the treatment of neurological disease, as well as the effects that advances in neuroscience have on our social, moral, and philosophical views. The neuroscience of ethics, which has received considerably less attention, may be described as a scientific approach to understanding ethical behavior. Psychiatrist and lawyer Laurence Tancredi …

Confidentiality And Privacy Implications Of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Stacey A. Tovino

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Advances in science and technology frequently raise new ethical, legal, and social issues, and developments in neuroscience and neuroimaging technology are no exception. Within the field of neuroethics, leading scientists, ethicists, and humanists are exploring the implications of efforts to image, study, treat, and enhance the human brain.

This article focuses on one aspect of neuroethics: the confidentiality and privacy implications of advances in functional magnetic resonance imaging (“fMRI”). Following a brief orientation to fMRI and an overview of some of its current and proposed uses, this article highlights key confidentiality and privacy issues raised by fMRI in the contexts …