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Medical Jurisprudence Commons

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Civil Rights and Discrimination

Selected Works

2013

Constitutional Law

Articles 1 - 4 of 4

Full-Text Articles in Medical Jurisprudence

"Rfra Exemptions From The Contraception Mandate: An Unconstitutional Accommodation Of Religion", Frederick Mark Gedicks, Rebecca G. Van Tassell Sep 2013

"Rfra Exemptions From The Contraception Mandate: An Unconstitutional Accommodation Of Religion", Frederick Mark Gedicks, Rebecca G. Van Tassell

Frederick Mark Gedicks

Litigation surrounding use of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to exempt employers from the Affordable Care Act’s “contraception mandate” is moving steadily towards eventual resolution in the U.S. Supreme Court. Both opponents and supporters of the mandate, however, have overlooked Establishment Clause limits on such exemptions. The fiery religious-liberty rhetoric surrounding the mandate has obscured that RFRA is a “permissive” rather than “mandatory” accommodation of religion—that is, a voluntary government concession to religious belief and practice that is not required by the Free Exercise Clause. Permissive accommodations must satisfy Establishment Clause constraints, notably the requirement that the accommodation not impose …


Public Assistance, Drug Testing And The Law: The Limits Of Population-Based Legal Analysis, Candice Player Aug 2013

Public Assistance, Drug Testing And The Law: The Limits Of Population-Based Legal Analysis, Candice Player

Candice T Player

In Populations, Public Health and the Law, legal scholar Wendy Parmet urges courts to embrace population-based legal analysis, a public health inspired approach to legal reasoning. Parmet contends that population-based legal analysis offers a way to analyze legal issues—not unlike law and economics—as well as a set of values from which to critique contemporary legal discourse. Population-based analysis has been warmly embraced by the health law community as a bold new way of analyzing legal issues. Still population-based analysis is not without its problems. At times Parmet claims too much territory for the population-perspective. Moreover Parmet urges courts to recognize …


Life And Death Decision-Making: Judges V. Legislators As Sources Of Law In Bioethics, Charles Baron Aug 2013

Life And Death Decision-Making: Judges V. Legislators As Sources Of Law In Bioethics, Charles Baron

Charles H. Baron

In some situations, courts may be better sources of new law than legislatures. Some support for this proposition is provided by the performance of American courts in the development of law regarding the “right to die.” When confronted with the problems presented by mid-Twentieth Century technological advances in prolonging human life, American legislators were slow to act. It was the state common law courts, beginning with Quinlan in 1976, that took primary responsibility for gradually crafting new legal principles that excepted withdrawal of life-prolonging treatment from the application of general laws dealing with homicide and suicide. These courts, like the …


The Issue Is Being Intersex: The Current Standard Of Care Is A Result Of Ignorance, And It Is Amazing What A Little Analysis Can Conclude., Marla J. Ferguson Jun 2013

The Issue Is Being Intersex: The Current Standard Of Care Is A Result Of Ignorance, And It Is Amazing What A Little Analysis Can Conclude., Marla J. Ferguson

marla j ferguson

The Constitution was written to protect and empower all citizens of the United States, including those who are born with Disorders of Sex Development. The medical community, as a whole, is not equipped with the knowledge required to adequately diagnose or treat intersex babies. Intersex simply means that the baby is born with both male and female genitalia. The current method that doctors follow is to choose a sex to assign the baby, and preform irreversible surgery on them without informed consent. Ultimately the intersex babies are mutilated and robbed of many of their fundamental rights; most notably, the right …