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Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Law

2007

University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School

Articles 1 - 8 of 8

Full-Text Articles in Medicine and Health Sciences

Diabetes Treatments And Moral Hazard, Jonathan Klick, Thomas Stratmann Aug 2007

Diabetes Treatments And Moral Hazard, Jonathan Klick, Thomas Stratmann

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In the face of rising rates of diabetes, many states have passed laws requiring health insurance plans to cover medical treatments for the disease. Although supporters of the mandates expect them to improve the health of diabetics, the mandates have the potential to generate a moral hazard to the extent that medical treatments might displace individual behavioral improvements. Another possibility is that the mandates do little to improve insurance coverage for most individuals, as previous research on benefit mandates has suggested that mandates often duplicate what plans already cover. To examine the effects of these mandates, we employ a triple-differences …

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Why De Minimis?, Matthew D. Adler Jun 2007

Why De Minimis?, Matthew D. Adler

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De minimis cutoffs are a familiar feature of risk regulation. This includes the quantitative “individual risk” thresholds for fatality risks employed in many contexts by EPA, FDA, and other agencies, such as the 1-in-1 million lifetime cancer risk cutoff; extreme event cutoffs for addressing natural hazards, such as the 100-year-flood or 475-year-earthquake; de minimis failure probabilities for built structures; the exclusion of low-probability causal models; and other policymaking criteria. All these tests have a common structure, as I show in the Article. A de minimis test, broadly defined, tells the decisionmaker to determine whether the probability of some outcome is …

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Super Size Me And The Conundrum Of Race/Ethnicity, Gender, And Class For The Contemporary Law-Genre Documentary Filmmaker, Regina Austin Jun 2007

Super Size Me And The Conundrum Of Race/Ethnicity, Gender, And Class For The Contemporary Law-Genre Documentary Filmmaker, Regina Austin

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According to director Morgan Spurlock, the idea for "Super Size Me," the hugely popular documentary that explored the health impact of fast food, originated from a news report about Pelman v. McDonald’s, one of the fast food obesity cases. Over the course of his month-long McDonald’s binge, Spurlock became the literal embodiment of fast-food’s ill-effects on the seemingly generic American adult physique. Spurlock’s take on the subject, however, ignores the circumstances that contributed to the overweight conditions of the Pelman plaintiffs who were two black adolescent females who ate their fast food in the Bronx. One of them was homeless …

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The Non-Problem Of Free Will In Forensic Psychiatry And Psychology, Stephen J. Morse Mar 2007

The Non-Problem Of Free Will In Forensic Psychiatry And Psychology, Stephen J. Morse

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This article demonstrates that there is no free will problem in forensic psychiatry by showing that free will or its lack is not a criterion for any legal doctrine and it is not an underlying general foundation for legal responsibility doctrines and practices. There is a genuine metaphysical free will problem, but the article explains why it is not relevant to forensic practice. Forensic practitioners are urged to avoid all usage of free will in their forensic thinking and work product because it is irrelevant and spawns confusion.

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Abortion Access And Risky Sex Among Teens: Parental Involvement Laws And Sexually Transmitted Diseases, Jonathan Klick, Thomas Stratmann Jan 2007

Abortion Access And Risky Sex Among Teens: Parental Involvement Laws And Sexually Transmitted Diseases, Jonathan Klick, Thomas Stratmann

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Laws requiring minors to seek parental consent or to notify a parent prior to obtaining an abortion raise the cost of risky sex for teenagers. Assuming choices to engage in risky sex are made rationally, parental involvement laws should lead to less risky sex among teens, either because of a reduction of sexual activity altogether or because teens will be more fastidious in the use of birth control ex ante. Using gonorrhea rates among older women to control for unobserved heterogeneity across states, our results indicate that the enactment of parental involvement laws significantly reduces risky sexual activity among teenage …

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Reasonable Emissions Of Greenhouse Gases: Efficient Abatement For A Stock Pollutant, Howard F. Chang Jan 2007

Reasonable Emissions Of Greenhouse Gases: Efficient Abatement For A Stock Pollutant, Howard F. Chang

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No abstract provided.

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Originalism And Its Discontents (Plus A Thought Or Two About Abortion), Mitchell N. Berman Jan 2007

Originalism And Its Discontents (Plus A Thought Or Two About Abortion), Mitchell N. Berman

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No abstract provided.

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The Uneasy Entente Between Legal Insanity And Mens Rea: Beyond Clark V. Arizona, Stephen J. Morse, Morris B. Hoffman Jan 2007

The Uneasy Entente Between Legal Insanity And Mens Rea: Beyond Clark V. Arizona, Stephen J. Morse, Morris B. Hoffman

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There is uneasy tension in the criminal law between the doctrines of mens rea and the defense of legal insanity. Last term, the Supreme Court addressed both these issues, but failed to clarify the relation between them. Using a wide range of interdisciplinary materials, this article discusses the broad doctrinal, theoretical, and normative issues concerning responsibility that arise in this context. We clarify the meaning of mental disorder, mens rea and legal insanity, the justification for and the relation between the latter two, and the relation among all three. Next we consider the reasoning in Clark, and for the most …

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