Digital Commons Network^™

Guidance From Vaccination Jurisprudence, Michael Ulrich

Faculty Scholarship

The lengthy history of case law covering compulsory vaccination policies state consistently that conscientious exemptions and evaluating their validity can be difficult, administratively cumbersome, and potentially unconstitutional.

Towards A Framework Convention On Global Health: A Transformative Agenda For Global Health Justice, Lawrence O. Gostin, Eric A. Friedman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

International law has responded weakly to the inequities in health care, public health, and the broader determinates of health that collectively cause the greatest loss of lives and human potential every year. Approximately one-third of global deaths can be attributed to enduring and unconscionable inequities. Despite significant progress in improving global health over the past several decades, these inequities persist. Current global governance for health is inadequate to the task of resolving these inequities, from lack of accountability and enforcement to inadequate funding and the absence of leadership required to respond to the threats to health that arise from other …

Confronting Criminal Law’S Violence: The Possibilities Of Unfinished Alternatives, Allegra M. Mcleod

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Confronting criminal law’s violence calls for an openness to unfinished alternatives — a willingness to engage in partial, in process, incomplete reformist efforts that seek to displace conventional criminal law administration as a primary mechanism for social order maintenance. But despite all indications that the status quo in U.S. criminal law administration is profoundly dysfunctional — an institutional manifestation of the deepest pathologies in our society — contemporary criminal law reform efforts and scholarship focus almost exclusively on relatively limited modifications to the status quo. These modifications may well render criminal law administration more humane, but fail to substitute alternative …

Bloomberg’S Health Legacy: Urban Innovator Or Meddling Nanny?, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Michael Bloomberg leaves the mayoralty of New York City, with his health legacy is bitterly contested. The public health community views him as an urban innovator—a rare political and business leader willing to fight for a built environment conducive to healthier, safer lifestyles. To his distractors, however, Bloomberg epitomizes a meddling nanny—an elitist dictating to largely poor and working class people about how they ought to lead their lives. His policies have sparked intense public, corporate, and political ire—critical of sweeping mayoral power to socially engineer the city and its inhabitants.

Here, I seek to show how Bloomberg has fundamentally …

Waylaid By A Metaphor: A Deeply Problematic Account Of Prison Growth. Review Of Plague Of Prisons: The Epidemiology Of Mass Incarceration In America By Ernest Drucker, John F. Pfaff

Faculty Scholarship

This article reviews Ernest Drucker's recent book, "A Plague of Prisons: The Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America," which attempts to explain the causes behind the explosion in prison growth over the past several decades. The account proves to be unsatisfying, and this review highlights four major flaws with Drucker's work. First, Drucker places too much weight on the war on drugs. While he argues it is the primary engine of prison growth, the increase in drug incarcerations explains only about 25% of the total growth since the 1970s. Second, he significantly underplays the importance of soaring crime rates between …

Vol. 4 No. 1, Fall 2012; Beyond The Womb: An Argument For Fundamental Rights In Vaccination Exemption Law, Samantha Hardt

Northern Illinois Law Review Supplement

This Comment analyzes jurisprudence from the areas of abortion law and family autonomy rights, blending principles from both to suggest that a parent's right to decline vaccinations for his/her child should be deemed fundamental and, thus, should be statutorily protected by philosophical exemptions.

Cash, Crops, Chemicals, And Cosmetics: A Mid-Green Eco-Labeling Approach, Michael T. Olexa, R. Benjamin Lingle, Kimberly Stewart, Damian C. Adams

Journal of Food Law & Policy

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) uses grade standards to uniformly characterize the quality and condition of agricultural commodities. The standards are promulgated by the USDA's Agricultural Marketing Services (AMS) division in consultation with farming industry groups. Emphasizing produce attributes such as surface defects, shape, cleanliness, color, maturity, and decay, grade standards improve the marketability of agricultural commodities by establishing a common industry language for use in contracts. Use of such a language enables wholesale buyers to know the quality of commodities without first having to inspect them, thus facilitating trade by lowering transaction costs.

Tuskegee Redux: Evolution Of Legal Mandates For Human Experimentation, Robert S. Levine, Jamila C. Williams, Barbara A. Kilbourne, Paul D. Juarez

Sociology Faculty Research

Human health experiments systematically expose people to conditions beyond the boundaries of medical evidence. Such experiments have included legal-medical collaboration, exemplified in the U.S. by the Public Health Service (PHS) Syphilis Study (Tuskegee). That medical experiment was legal, conforming to segregationist protocols and specific legislative authorization which excluded a selected group of African Americans from any medical protection from syphilis. Subsequent corrective action outlawed unethical medical experiments but did not address other forms of collaboration, including PHS submission to laws which may have placed African American women at increased risk from AIDS and breast cancer. Today, anti-lobbying law makes it …

Personal Environmental Information: The Promise And Perils Of The Emerging Capacity To Identify Individual Environmental Harms, Katrina Fischer Kuh

Vanderbilt Law Review

A variety of modern technologies reveal individual behaviors that have environmental consequences with increasing clarity. Smart meters and related technologies detect detailed information about when and how individuals use electricity within the home. Radio frequency identification ("RFID") chips embedded in recycling collection bins track household recycling behaviors, including everything from whether the household is recycling to whether its members properly separate their recyclables. Regulators use aerial imagery and geographic information systems ("GIS") technology to detect violations of local building codes and the illegal filling of wetlands. Interactive "ecomaps" allow city residents to compare environmental performance by zip code. Even information …

From Fenway Park To The Mall Of America: A Multi-Collaborative Approach To Teaching And Learning, Micah L. Berman, Michael Freiberg, Julie Ralston Aoki

University of Dayton Law Review

Special issue: Articles on legal research and writing

Cruel But Not So Unusual: Farmer V. Brennan And The Devolving Standards Of Decency, Stacy Lancaster Cozad

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Bragdon V. Abbott: The Supreme Court's Anti-Discrimination Advocacy And The Reopening Of Pandora's Box , Brett D. Watson

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Chronic Care And Prevention: Evolution In Practice And Finance, John V. Jacobi

Marquette Elder's Advisor

No abstract provided.

Prevention Paradigms, Over-Diagnosis And Treatment, And Mad Men, Alison Barnes

Marquette Elder's Advisor

No abstract provided.

Cows, Congress, And Climate Change: Authority And Responsibility For Federal Agencies To End Grazing On Public Lands, Marya Torrez

Celebrating WCL Student Authors

No abstract provided.

Rethinking Hiv-Exposure Crimes, Margo Kaplan

Indiana Law Journal

This Article challenges the current legislative and scholarly approaches to HIV-exposure crimes and proposes an alternative framework to address their flaws. Twenty-four states criminalize consensual sexual activities of people with HIV. Current statutes and the scholarship that supports them focus on HIV-positive status, sexual activity, and knowledge of HIV-positive status as proxies for risk, mental state, and consent to risk. As a result, they are dramatically over- and underinclusive and stigmatize individuals living with HIV. Criminalization should be limited to circumstances in which a defendant exposed her partner to a substantial degree of unassumed risk and did so with a …

Dispatch From The Culture War: Virginia's Failed Hpv Vaccination Mandate, Rachel Reynolds

Law Student Publications

This paper will inquire into what makes Gardasil different from other vaccines, and how that impacts its administration. Part I will describe the specifics of the HPV vaccine: how it works and how Virginia decided to promote its usage. Part II will examine the ways in which jurisdictions have traditionally understood vaccination policy, and contrast it with the ways in which they have handled the HPV vaccine. Part III will examine the disadvantages of continuing the mandate’s ineffective political war of attrition, and suggest a coalition-building strategy to effect policy that honors communal values and meaningfully increases access to the …

Bio-Cultural Knowledge And The Challenges Of Intellectual Property Rights Regimes For African Development, Ikechi Mgbeoji

Dalhousie Law Journal

African states have, since the colonial encounter, been part of the international regimes on intellectual property rights. Formal accession to various treaties and conventions on intellectual property rights instruments should not be mistaken for actual internalization of the policies, structures and norms required for reaping the promised benefits of participation in such regimes. There is ample evidence showing that most African states do not have the requisite structures for fruitful engagement with international intellectual property rights regimes. Until this anomaly is rectified, African states' engagement with international intellectual property regimes will remain structurally flawed and inimical to the human development …

Leveraging The Dialectical Theory In Case Study Analysis: Genzyme's Ethical Dilemma, Andrei Duta

The Journal of Business, Entrepreneurship & the Law

This paper provides the theoretical framework for a case study that I share with students in my courses. The dialectical theory is used to analyze ethical conundrums pertaining to Genzyme, a successful bio-tech corporation based in Boston, Massachusetts that manufactures treatments for serious diseases such as kidney problems, immune diseases, and cancer. We discuss questions such as: is Genzyme acting unethically when averaging extremely high profit margins on drugs for rare diseases? Is the company taking advantage of the lack of pharmaceutical choices that patients have when addressing their ailments? The dialectical theory provides the framework and vocabulary for discussing, …

Cascading Constitutional Deprivation: The Right To Appointed Counsel For Mandatorily Detained Immigrants Pending Removal Proceedings, Mark Noferi

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Today, an immigrant green card holder mandatorily detained pending his removal proceedings, without bail and without counsel, due to a minor crime committed perhaps long ago, faces a dire fate. If he contests his case, he may remain incarcerated in substandard conditions for months or years. While incarcerated, he will likely be unable to acquire a lawyer, access family who might assist him, obtain key evidence, or contact witnesses. In these circumstances, he will nearly inevitably lose his deportation case and be banished abroad from work, family, and friends. The immigrant's one chance to escape these cascading events is the …

Racial And Ethnic Disparities In Post-Disaster Mental Health: Examining The Evidence Through A Lens Of Social Justice, Jonathan Purtle

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Rising To The Surface: Disasters And Racial Health Disparities In American History, Marian Moser Jones

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

From The Editor, Alison Mcchrystal Barnes

Marquette Elder's Advisor

No abstract provided.

When Never Happens: Implications Of Medicare's Never-Event Policy, Hudson T. Rowland

Marquette Elder's Advisor

This article discusses the Healthiest Wisconsin 2010 (HW2010) statute and its implementation to improve patient care through a denial of payment to hospitals when a selected condition takes place. The state of Wisconsin has created a program to improve the state's overall health through a partnership between the state department of health, universities, and other health providers. While the two programs have their differences, this article explores how the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services can learn from Wisconsin and HW2010 to create a more reasonable plan to improve patient safety.

Bringing Age Discrimination And Disability Discrimination Together: Too Few Intersections, Too Many Interstices, Leslie Pickering Francis, Anita Silvers

Marquette Elder's Advisor

Old age and disability would seem to have adverse features in common. Membership in either group suggests depleted capability, decreased social contribution, significant fragility, and heightened susceptibility to maltreatment by other people. Yet some have argued that no wrong occurs when advanced age is made disadvantageous, for the elderly have had a fair chance at the goods of life. By contract, this argument goes, there is never a fair chance for people with disabilities. This article challenges the view that takes discrimination based on disability and discrimination based on age as so discrepant that they do not deserve similar efforts …

An O’Neill Institute Briefing Paper: The Supreme Court’S Landmark Decision On The Affordable Care Act: Healthcare Reform’S Ultimate Fate Remains Uncertain, Emily W. Parento, Lawrence O. Gostin

O'Neill Institute Papers

The Supreme Court’s decision on the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) is a landmark on the path toward ensuring universal access to health care in the United States. In a 5-4 decision written by Chief Justice Roberts, the Court upheld the law in its entirety with the sole exception that Congress may not revoke existing state Medicaid funding to penalize states that decline to participate in the Medicaid expansion under the ACA. In this O’Neill Institute Briefing, we explain and analyze the Court’s decision, focusing on the individual purchase mandate and the Medicaid expansion, while …

Law In The Book And Law In Practice: Criminal Liability Over Vessel-Source Marine Pollution In China, Nengye Liu

Global Environmental Law at a Crossroads

Nowadays, criminal liability over vessel-source pollution is a debatable issue worldwide. For example, after Erika and Prestige oil tanker spill disasters, the EU adopted Directive 2005/35/EC, which imposes criminal liability over vessel-source pollution. This raised the Intertanko Case in the European Court of Justice. The shipping industry tried to challenge the legality of Directive 2005/35/EC under international law.

China is now a great shipping power as well as the second largest seafarers supplier in the world. Meanwhile, vast sea areas under China’s jurisdiction are under threat of vessel-source pollution. This presentation addresses criminal liability over vessel-source pollution in China. Relevant …

Newsletter Summer 2012

Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Herding Immunity: Can U.S. Public Health Fight Off Disease Using Canada's Voluntary Vaccination System?, Tara Sheoran

Cardozo Journal of International and Comparative Law

The note advocates for the adoption of uniform federal vaccination laws in the United States, allowing only medical exemptions, to effectively protect public health. It references the Jacobson v. Massachusetts case, which upheld states' authority to mandate vaccinations, and contrasts the U.S. system with Canada's voluntary approach. The author argues that cultural differences in the U.S. make a voluntary system infeasible and emphasizes the need to balance individual rights with collective safety to prevent disease resurgence and maintain herd immunity.

Expanding Horizons: Scientific Frontiers, Legal Regulation And Globalization, Belinda Bennett

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

In the six decades since the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA by Watson and Crick in 1953, developments in genetic science have transformed our understanding of human health and disease. These developments, along with those in other areas such as computer science, biotechnology, and nanotechnology, have opened exciting new possibilities for the future. In addition, the increasing trend for technologies to converge and build upon each other potentially increases the pace of change, constantly expanding the boundaries of the scientific frontier. At the same time, however, scientific advances are often accompanied by public unease over the potential …