Medical Jurisprudence Commons^™

Forgotten Parties: Shifting The Focus Of Donor Conception To Donor-Conceived Persons Through Reasonable Regulation, Tiffany D. Gardner

Mercer Law Review

In an age in which information is at our fingertips with a few keystrokes, members of the fertility industry are increasingly confronting the reality that anonymous sperm and egg donation is no longer realistic—and has not been for some time. With the advent of at-home commercial DNA testing, multiple generations are not only learning they were conceived through the use of reproductive material provided by third parties (“donors”) but also identifying those formerly anonymous donors. These revelations, and increasing advocacy by the people born of such donations (i.e., donor-conceived people) are changing the landscape of third-party reproduction around the world. …

Under Kemp’S Eye: Analyzing The Constitutionality Of The Heartbeat Restriction In Georgia’S Life Act And Its Potential Impact On Abortion Law, Brittney A. Sizemore

Mercer Law Review

The current state of women’s right to bodily autonomy in the United States has eerily begun to resemble that of the dystopian society depicted in The Handmaid’s Tale. While abortion rates have steadily declined over the last decade, the attempts by state legislatures to restrict or completely take away women’s right to abortion have exponentially increased. In the first six months of 2019 alone, five states passed laws placing restrictions on abortion. These restrictions range from limiting the time frame in which a woman may obtain an abortion to when a fetal heartbeat has been detected—normally around six weeks—to a …

Keeping The Government Away From Medicaid Recipients' Pocketbook: Protecting Medicaid Recipients' Rights To Proceeds Of Third-Party Settlements In Arkansas Department Of Health & Human Services V. Ahlborn, Sean Sandison

Mercer Law Review

In Arkansas Department of Health & Human Services v. Ahlborn, the United States Supreme Court approached the contentious issue of whether Medicaid and state Medicaid agencies can recover expenses incurred on behalf of a Medicaid recipient from the entirety of the recipient's third-party settlement. Over the past decade, several states and the United States Department of Health and Human Services have reached opposite results on this question. In its unanimous opinion, the Court quelled the debate by limiting Medicaid and the corresponding state programs' recoveries from third-party settlements to the proceeds representing repayment of medical expenses, a move likely …

Jaffee V. Redmond: The Supreme Court Adopts A Federal Psychotherapist-Patient Privilege And Extends The Scope To Encompass Licensed Social Workers, Melanie Stephens Stone

Mercer Law Review

Acknowledging conflict among the courts of appeals, and recognizing the importance of the issue, the United States Supreme Court granted certiorari in Jaffee v. Redmond to decide whether federal courts should recognize a privilege for communications between psychotherapist and patient under Rule 501 of the Federal Rules of Evidence.

Antiprogestin Drugs: Medical And Legal Issues, Rebecca J. Cook

Mercer Law Review

The United States Supreme Court decision in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, one aspect of which upheld state conditions limiting delivery of late abortion services, underscores the need for safe and reliable means to perform abortion early in pregnancy. The Missouri statute reviewed in Webster raised an additional issue in its preamble, which contained the words: "The life of each human being begins at conception."' The Court saw no need to address the implications of this language yet, and is prepared instead to await a judicial challenge to legislation specifically providing for state intervention on these grounds. It is …

The Status Of The Permanently Unconscious: "You Call That Living?", Jay A. Gold

Mercer Law Review

In the aftermath of the United States Supreme Court decision in Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health, the writer Nat Hentoff described the prospects for resolving the issue of termination of treatment for the permanently unconscious as "The Coming Civil War":

It will be very much like the civil war . . . since the Supreme Court ... allowed the states to increase their regulatory powdr over abortion, ... there will now be intensified lobbying to amend or create state laws that will either make it harder or easier for death to come calling. . . . .As …

The Solomon Decision: A Study Of Davis V. Davis, Margie Mietling Eget

Mercer Law Review

An individual's basic right to control procreation has come head-tohead with the ability of modern science to bypass the normal procedure through in vitro fertilization and cryopreservation. This was the issue that confronted the Tennessee court in a divorce proceeding between Mary Sue and Junior Davis. The appellate court held that the lower court's awarding of the fertilized ova to Mary Sue against Junior's will constituted impermissible state action and violated Junior's constitutionally protected right not to beget a child when no pregnancy had taken place. The court noted that the right to procreate and to prevent procreation are basic …

Legal Theory In Late Modernity, Alan G. Nasser

Mercer Law Review

The contemporary intellectual climate bears a striking resemblance to the milieu of epistemological and moral insecurity that characterized the dawn of Modernity. Rene Descartes, the so-called "father of modern philosophy," felt obliged, in the original epistemological gambit of modern philosophy, to subject the then-current orthodoxy to universal methodical doubt. Descartes felt driven to this procedure by the drastic deprecation of traditional beliefs that accompanied the mathematical, scientific, and social revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The demise of the geocentric cosmology, the rise of a mechanistic ontology with its attendant undermining of teleological modes of explanation, and the emergence …

Statutory Criteria For Determining Human Death, James M. Humber

Mercer Law Review

Until approximately twenty years ago, human beings were not declared dead until they experienced an irreversible cessation of respiratory and circulatory functions. Use of these criteria-which are known as the heart-lung criteria for determining human death-was not problematical until modern medicine invented the means for artificially maintaining heartbeat and respiration. With the development of artificial life-support mechanisms, patients who were irreversibly comatose could be kept "alive" indefinitely. Maintaining these patients imposed financial and emotional hardships upon family members, utilized scarce medical resources in nonefficient ways, and denied use of comatose patients' organs for transplant purposes. In an attempt to remedy …

Dna Fingerprinting: A Scientific Perspective, Linda R. Adkison

Mercer Law Review

The birth of genetics in the 1860s occurred in a solitary monastery by a humble monk, Gregor Johann Mendel, who performed unprecedented experiments with garden peas. The rebirth of his work at the turn of the century has slowly led to an intermingling of various physical, chemical, and biological sciences. This process, in turn, is continually yielding an understanding of how characteristics are inherited, combined, assorted, and reassorted through generation after generation. The common thread connecting these divergent, yet convergent, disciplines is the remarkable double stranded helix, described by James D. Watson and Maurice H.F. Crick and known as deoxyribonucleic …

Leckelt V. Board Of Commissioners Of Hospital District No. 1: Fifth Circuit Affirms Hospital's Right To Require Testing Of Nurse Reasonably Suspected Of Exposure To Hiv, Philip Walden

Mercer Law Review

In Leckelt v. Board of Commissioners of Hospital District No. 1, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed a hospital's right to demand the results of a nurse's HIV test if a reasonable suspicion exists that the nurse has been exposed to HIV. The court also upheld the hospital's right to fire the nurse for withholding the test results Although the nurse, Kevin Leckelt, attacked the hospital's action on both constitutional and statutory grounds, this Casenote focuses on the court's determination that the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (the "Act" or the "Rehabilitation Act") permits the …

Autonomy's Paradox: Death, Fear, And Advance Directives, Richard P. Vance

Mercer Law Review

"The trouble with our times," noted Paul Valery, "is that the future is not what it used to be." As it is with' the zeitgeist, so it is with advance directives ("ADs"). ADs are declarations that one does not want particular kinds of medical treatment when one loses decision-making capacity. These mechanisms have received increased attention since the first living will statute was passed in 1976. Even more interest has arisen in light of the United States Supreme Court decision in Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health. Since many states may now legitimately require "clear and convincing evidence" …

Controlling Conflicts Of Interest In The Doctor-Patient Relationship: Lessons From Moore V. Regents Of The University Of California, Joseph M. Healey Jr., Kara L. Dowling

Mercer Law Review

No abstract provided.

Treatments Of Last Resort: Informed Consent And The Diffusion Of New Technology, Nancy M.P. King, Gail Henderson

Mercer Law Review

Professor Alexander Capron's seminal 1974 article, "Informed Consent in Catastrophic Disease Research and Treatment,"1 opens with a discussion of Karp v. Cooleys a lawsuit arising from Dr. Denton Cooley's first use of the artificial heart, in which Haskell Karp's widow unsuccessfully claimed that her husband's consent to use of the experimental device was inadequately informed. Today, more than twenty years after that surgery took place, American medical technology has markedly advanced and public awareness of informed consent has greatly increased, but doctors and patients may not have changed much at all. Both still have contradictory needs and desires. We want …

Cruzan And The Right To Die: A Perspective On Privacy Interests, Désirée E. Watson

Mercer Law Review

On June 25, 1990, the United States Supreme Court decided that Nancy Beth Cruzan does not have a constitutional right to die. In Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health, a five-four majority held that a state may require clear and convincing evidence of a now-incompetent person's wishes when a guardian seeks to discontinue life support, including artificial nutrition and hydration, for a person diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state.