Digital Commons Network^™

A Global Vaccine Injury Compensation System, Sam F. Halabi, Saad B. Ommer

Faculty Publications

Vaccines are extremely safe and harm is rare. Worldwide, more than 30000 vaccine doses are delivered per second through routine immunization programs, which, in turn, prevent an estimated 2 million to 3 million deaths annually. Yet the specter of vaccine injury plays a central role in vaccine access and will continue to do so as vaccine technologies evolve.

Zika, Pregnancy, And The Law, Sam F. Halabi

Faculty Publications

This Essay situates a crucial component of the public health response to Zika - the effort to develop a safe and effective vaccine - within the broader literature. It does so in an effort to highlight the need to revisit the relationship between law and pregnancy - not only in the areas legal scholars have prioritized so far, but also in the context of routine and emergency maternal health, which has heretofore been largely assumed to be governed by straightforward norms and practices based on medical evidence and physician ethics. In fact, whereas the current literature tends to assume or …

Fda And The Practice Of Medicine: Looking At Off–Label Drugs, Wendy Teo

Seton Hall Journal of Legislation and Public Policy

No abstract provided.

Teaching The Hipaa Privacy Rule, Stacey A. Tovino

Saint Louis University Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Remedying Stigma-Driven Health Disparities In Sexual Minorities, Valarie K. Blake

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Free Exercise Of Religious Identity, Lauren Sudeall Lucas

Faculty Publications By Year

In recent years, a particular strain of argument has arisen in response to decisions by courts or the government to extend certain rights to others. Grounded in religious freedom, these arguments suggest that individuals have a right to operate businesses or conduct their professional roles in a manner that conforms to their religious identity. For example, as courts and legislatures have extended the right to marry to same-sex couples, court clerks have refused to issue marriage certificates to such couples, claiming that to do so would violate their religious beliefs. Similarly, corporations have refused, for reasons grounded in religious identity, …

Law In The Time Of Cholera, Rhett B. Larson

Notre Dame Law Review

Thousands die each day from infections related to water, as evidenced in the ongoing crises of cholera in Haiti, Zika in the Western Hemisphere, and Legionnaires’ Disease in Flint, Michigan. Yet water law focuses primarily on two agendas. First, the “Blue Agenda” aims to provide an equitable allocation of water to individuals and communities while encouraging sustainable water management. Second, the “Green Agenda” aims to efficiently protect water in the natural environment from pollution. These two agendas often ignore, and can be inconsistent with, the “Red Agenda.” The Red Agenda addresses prevention of waterborne infections, like cholera, and the habitat …

Federalism And Health Care In Canada: A Troubled Romance?, Colleen M. M. Flood, William Lahey Prof., Bryan P. Thomas

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Canadian federalism fragments health system governance. Although the Constitution has been interpreted as providing shared jurisdiction over health generally, with respect to health care, the courts have interpreted it as giving direct jurisdiction to the provinces. The federal role in health care is therefore indirect, but nevertheless potentially powerful. For example, the federal government has used its spending powers to establish the Canada Health Act (CHA), which commits funding to provinces on condition they provide first-dollar public coverage of hospital and physician services. However, in recent times, as federal contributions have declined, the CHA has been weakly enforced. …

A Foe More Than A Friend: Law And The Health Of The American Urban Poor, David Ray Papke, Mary Elise Papke

Fordham Urban Law Journal

No abstract provided.

In Defense Of California's Mandatory Child Vaccination Law: California Courts Should Not Depart From Established Precedent, Stephanie Awanyai

Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

In the wake of the 2015 measles outbreak in California, California Senate Bill 277 (S.B. 277) was enacted. S.B. 277 repeals the personal belief exemption to California’s immunization requirement for children in public and private educational or child care facilities in the State. While S.B. 277 was enacted to prevent the spread of contagious diseases through mandatory vaccinations of school-aged children, there are objections to this approach. Parents who oppose S.B. 277 contend that S.B. 277 violates their federal and state constitutional rights to make medical decisions on behalf of their child, and infringes on their child’s fundamental state interest …

Pasture To Package: Ensuring Food Safety Compliance And Animal Welfare Integrity In Grass-Fed Beef Production, Lauren Manning

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

Towards A Better Connection: A Federally-Led Uniform Reimbursement Scheme For Telemedicine, Meredith Price

Student Works

No abstract provided.

Weapons Of Mass Hysteria, Faulty Biothreat Predictions, And Their Impact On National (In)Security: A Case-Study Of Smallpox, Barbara Pfeffer Billauer

Health Matrix: The Journal of Law-Medicine

Biothreat projections for pandemic and bioterrorist planning are generated by a straight-forward computational system, rather than scientific evidence.

Time For A Change: 20 Years After The "Working Group" Principles, Barbara Cox

Faculty Scholarship

This article discusses three aspects of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Section on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity’s history. First, it reviews the section’s activities at the 1992 AALS Annual Meeting. Second, it discusses how the AALS implemented its Bylaw and Executive Committee Regulations that prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation (and now gender identity after a recent revision). Finally, it encourages the AALS to discontinue use of some of the guidelines adopted in the early 1990s to guide its interactions with religiously affiliated law schools when conflicts arise concerning allegations of sexual orientation or gender …

Recent Developments In Climate Justice, Randall S. Abate, Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Maria Antonia Tigre, Patricia Ferreira, Wil Burns

Journal Publications

Climate justice can be defined generally as addressing the disproportionate burden of climate change impacts on poor and marginalized communities. It seeks to promote more equitable allocation of these burdens at the local, national, and global levels through proactive regulatory initiatives and reactive judicial remedies that draw on international human rights and domestic environmental justice theories. Yet, efforts to define climate justice as a field of inquiry remain elusive and underinclusive; a recent book, Climate Justice: Case Studies in Global and Regional Governance Challenges (ELI Press 2016), seeks to fill that void by providing an overview of the landscape of …

Teaching The Hipaa Privacy Rule: Illustrative Comparisons, Stacey A. Tovino

Faculty Articles

Twenty years ago, President Clinton signed the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) into law. Over the past two decades, the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has published several sets of rules implementing the Administrative Simplification provisions within HIPAA as well as the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical (HITECH) Act within the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). These rules include, but certainly are not limited to, a final rule published on January 25, 2013, governing the use and disclosure of protected health information by covered entities and their business associates (the …

Property And Sovereignty: An Indian Reserve And A Canadian City, Douglas C. Harris

All Faculty Publications

Property rights, wrote Morris Cohen in 1927, are delegations of sovereign power. They are created by the state and operate to establish limits on its power. As such, the allocation of property rights is an exercise of sovereignty and a limited delegation of it. Sixty years later, Joseph Singer used Cohen’s conceptual framing in a critical review of developments in American Indian law. Where the US Supreme Court had the opportunity to label an American Indian interest as either a sovereign interest or a property interest, he argued, it invariably chose to the disadvantage of the Indians. Within Canada, Indigenous …

Medicine Behind Bars: Regulating And Litigating Prison Healthcare Under State Law Forty Years After Estelle V. Gamble, Holger Sonntag

Case Western Reserve Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Free Exercise Of Religious Identity, Lauren Sudeall

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In recent years, a particular strain of argument has arisen in response to decisions by courts or the government to extend certain rights to others. Grounded in religious freedom, these arguments suggest that individuals have a right to operate businesses or conduct their professional roles in a manner that conforms to their religious identity. For example, as courts and legislatures have extended the right to marry to same-sex couples, court clerks have refused to issue marriage certificates to such couples, claiming that to do so would violate their religious beliefs. Similarly, corporations have refused, for reasons grounded in religious identity, …

Implementing Medicaid Health Homes To Provide Medication Assisted Treatment To Opioid Dependent Medicaid Beneficiaries, Page M. Smith

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Why Some Religious Accommodations For Mandatory Vaccinations Violate The Establishment Clause, Hillel Y. Levin

Scholarly Works

All states require parents to inoculate their children against deadly diseases prior to enrolling them in public schools, but the vast majority of states also allow parents to opt out on religious grounds. This religious accommodation imposes potentially grave costs on the children of non-vaccinating parents and on those who cannot be immunized. The Establishment Clause prohibits religious accommodations that impose such costs on third parties in some cases, but not in all. This presents a difficult line-drawing problem. The Supreme Court has offered little guidance, and scholars are divided.

This Article addresses the problem of religious accommodations that impose …

The Presumptions Of Classical Liberal Constitutionalism, Matthew J. Lindsay

All Faculty Scholarship

Richard A. Epstein’s The Classical Liberal Constitution is an imposing addition to the burgeoning body of legal scholarship that seeks to “restore” a robust conception of economic liberty and limited government to its rightful place at the center of American constitutionalism. Legislators and judges operating within a “classical liberal conception of government,” Epstein explains, would approach skeptically “[a]ll [regulatory] proposals that deviate from the basic common law protections of life, liberty, and property.” Classical liberal constitutional courts would thus renounce the toothless rational basis review of the post-New Deal “progressive mindset,” and instead subject to exacting scrutiny the government’s “purported …

A Comparative Study Of U.S. And Chinese Environmental Law With A Focus On The Real Estate Industry, Jihong Wang, Paul Kossof

The International Lawyer

No abstract provided.

Accumulating Risk: Environmental Justice And The History Of Capitalism In Detroit, 1880-2015, Josiah John Rector

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation is an environmental history of Detroit, Michigan from the 19th century to the present. Recent scholarship on the history of capitalism has largely ignored the problem of environmental inequality, and the negative externalities of economic growth. In contrast, studies of the environmental justice movement have richly documented race, class, and gender inequalities in environmental risk exposure. However, they have neglected the relationship between the development of the environmental justice movement and the restructuring of American capitalism since the 1970s, including deindustrialization and the shift to neoliberalism. Bringing these fields together, this dissertation connects Detroit’s long-term economic transformation to …

Informal, Inquisitorial, And Accurate: An Empirical Look At A Problem-Solving Housing Court, Jessica K. Steinberg

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Substantive justice is often seen as elusive in courts dominated by low-income individuals. Complex court rules, coupled with pervasive lack of counsel, can make it difficult for the traditional adversary process to identify and redress legitimate grievances. This Article takes on the social problem of substandard housing and examines whether inquisitorial procedure has the potential to produce accurate outcomes in a tribunal dominated by the unrepresented.

Relying on in-court observations of nearly 300 hearings, and a longitudinal review of nearly 75 cases, this Article surfaces the regularized procedures utilized by a purported “problem-solving” housing court, and theorizes that the inquisitorial …

Teaching The Hipaa Privacy Rule, Stacey A. Tovino

Scholarly Works

Twenty years ago, President Clinton signed the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) into law. Over the past two decades, the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has published several sets of rules implementing the Administrative Simplification provisions within HIPAA as well as the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical (HITECH) Act within the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). These rules include, but certainly are not limited to, a final rule published on January 25, 2013, governing the use and disclosure of protected health information by covered entities and their business associates (the …

Teaching Public Policy Drafting In Law School: One Professor's Approach, Lisa A. Rich

Faculty Scholarship

This article provides an overview of the Drafting for Public Policy course offered at the Texas A&M University School of Law. The article addresses the theoretical and pedagogical underpinnings of the course, including how such a course easily encompasses the teaching of cultural context and awareness, as well as professional identity, and encourages students to engage deeply in the policymaking process. It also explores the continued relevance of the work of Harold D. Lasswell, as well as that of Myres McDougal and Anthony Kronman. These works, from 1943 and 1993 respectively, resonate now because they called on law schools to …

Advancing The Right To Health: The Vital Role Of Law, Lawrence O. Gostin, Oscar A. Cabrera, David Patterson, Roger Magnusson, Helena Nygren-Krug

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Effective laws and an enabling legal environment are essential to a healthy society. Most public health challenges – from infectious and non-communicable diseases to injuries, from mental illness to universal health coverage – have a legal component. At global, national and local levels, law is a powerful tool for advancing the right to health. This tool is, however, often underutilized.

This report aims to raise awareness about the role that public health laws can play in advancing the right to health and in creating the conditions for all people to live healthy lives. The report provides guidance about issues and …

Coping With The Threat Of Ebola In Monrovia: A Case Study, Augustine M. Sumo

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

In early 2014, 3 West African states of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone made news headlines when Ebola virus disease (EVD) ravaged the sub-region. The Liberian government was ill-equipped to efficiently contain EVD outbreak due to inadequate training for hospitals and healthcare workers. The government's mandatory cremation policies and the banning of public gatherings significantly contributed to the spread of EVD. EVD infected 10,666 and 4,808 died from the disease in the first 6 months of the epidemic. Using Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) as the theoretical framework, the purpose of this case study research was to examine the social, …

Contagion Without Relief: Democratic Experimentalism And Regulating The Use Of Antibiotics In Food-Producing Animals, Emilie Aguirre

Faculty Scholarship

We are progressing toward a post-antibiotic world: Antibiotic drugs that could once treat basic infections are losing their effectiveness at an accelerating rate. If this trend continues, common illnesses will become potentially deadly, and more complex procedures-chemotherapy, surgeries, dialysis-will carry much more significant risk. The modern industrial agricultural system may have contributed significantly to this state of affairs. The vast majority of antibiotics sold in the United States each year an estimated 70 to 80 percent-are for use in animal agriculture. These antibiotics are primarily administered to food-producing animals at routine, low doses as a cheap method of promoting faster …