Digital Commons Network^™

Strengthening Security And Oversight At Biological Research Laboratories, Michael Greenberger

Congressional Testimony

With the advent of the Anthrax attacks in the fall of 2001, this Nation has been confronted with a serious policy conundrum. On the one hand, we have strengthened programs that encourage the use of our best scientific resources to develop countermeasures to the weaponization of highly dangerous biopathogens. On the other hand, research on those countermeasures requires the use of the very biopathogens we seek to defeat. There have been many mishaps in the handling of those pathogens, which raises the frightening prospect that the research may be as (or more) dangerous than the potential bioterrorist acts themselves. Indeed, …

The Disappointed Expectations Test And The Economic Loss Doctrine, Ralph C. Anzivino

Marquette Law Review

None

Banning Felt Soles In Vermont: A Call For State Legislative Response To The Spread Of Invasive Didymo, Ferrell Spencer Ryan

Water Law Review

No abstract provided.

An Introduction To The Protocol To The African Charter On Human And Peoples' Rights On The Rights Of Women In Africa, Frans Viljoen

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

The Tipping Point: Biological Terrorism, Scott Cary

Journal of Strategic Security

This article presents a strategic, operational, and tactical analysis of information currently available on the state of bio-weapons development by non-state actors, primarily Islamist jihadists. It discusses the evidence supporting a practical assessment that non-state actors have begun to acquire, and in the near-term intend to employ, bio-weapons. A pathogen and method of attack specifically designed to achieve the strategic goals of jihadists are presented as functional examples of the problem of the emerging global bio-weapons threat.Is a terrorist attack utilizing biological weapons a real threat? If so, is there a way to predict the circumstances under which it might …

Supreme Court Brief Of Dr. Ananda Chakrabarty As Amicus Curiae In Support Of Petitioners, F. Scott Kieff, Richard A. Epstein

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

No abstract provided.

Regulating Sperm Donation: Why Requiring Exposed Donation Is Not The Answer, Vanessa L. Pi

Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy

[...] the risk of incest and consanguinity11 are prevalent with anonymous donation12 since there is no monitoring of the number of live births per donor. [...] the number of children born from sperm donation has doubled in recent years.30 Although sperm may be donated by a relative or close friend of the couple or individual, often the sperm is donated anonymously through a sperm bank or clinic.

Influenza A(H1n1) And Pandemic Preparedness Under The Rule Of International Law, Lawrence O. Gostin

O'Neill Institute Papers

A novel strain of Influenza A (H1N1) spread rapidly through Mexico in April 2009 and now spans the globe. By the time WHO was notified and responded, geographical containment was not feasible, leading the agency to call for mitigation. The international outbreak of SARS in 2003 and the more recent Influenza A (H5N1) among birds with limited transmission to humans helped prepare the world for the current pandemic threat. SARS galvanized the WHO to revise the antiquated International Health Regulations (IHR) in 2005, which took effect June 15, 2007. Governments instituted preparedness plans in response to avian influenza.

Despite increased …

The Copyright Revision Act Of 2026, Jessica Litman

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

American copyright law is broken. In fact, its failings are leading lawyers and scholars to find resourceful strategies to work around the deficiencies in the current state of the law. These strategies, the lecturer argues, indicate that a fundamental overhaul of copyright law is imminent. After lamenting the disconnect between academia and the practicing bar and examining the present laws' shortcomings felt by authors, distributors, and consumers alike, the lecturer provides three goals a new copyright regime should meet. First, copyright law should be more easily accessible and, likewise, understandable for non-lawyers. Second, the new copyright laws should reduce the …

Sunny Samaritans And Egomaniacs: Price-Fixing In The Gamete Market, Kimberly D. Krawiec

Law and Contemporary Problems

Krawiec compares the egg market to sperm market to illustrate the extent to which public-interest rhetoric enables private wealth transfers in the egg market. She also illuminates why such rhetoric is so effective, playing on deeply held societal norms. In addition, she provides an overview of the oocyte business, highlighting issues relating to recruitment, compensation, controversy, retrieval, and risk. She does the same for the sperm business. Furthermore, she discusses the anticompetitive behavior in the egg market and argues that the horizontal price-fixing embodied in the American Society for Reproductive Medicine's pricing guidelines violates the Sherman Act. Lastly, she concludes …

Improving Legal Competencies For Obesity Prevention And Control, Wendy Collins Perdue

Law Faculty Publications

Our purpose is to offer action options that will help to improve the legal competencies of public health practitioners and policy decision makers with respect to drafting, interpreting, implementing, and enforcing laws and regulations that are relevant to the effective prevention and control of obesity. The accompanying assessment paper provided a foundation for this agenda by first establishing that legal competence for obesity prevention and control is important for both health professionals, who with proper training can effectively interject health considerations into decision- making processes, and non-health professionals involved with relevant policy and legal work, who with proper training can …

Protective Privilege Versus Public Peril: How Illinois Has Failed To Balance Patient Confidentiality With The Mental Health Professional's Duty To Protect The Public, Mary I. Wood

Northern Illinois University Law Review

Mental health professionals face conflicting duties when their patients make threats of violence toward readily identifiable third parties: the duty to protect intended victims and the duty to maintain the confidentiality of patients. The seminal 1976 case, Tarasoff v. Regents of University of California, underscored the tension between these duties--unnecessary breaches of confidentiality may erode the therapeutic doctor/patient relationship and lead to liability for the doctor, but lack of action may cause devastating consequences for the victim. In the wake of the Tarasoff decision, most states enacted statutes codifying a mental health professional's duty to protect third parties from potentially …

Pandemic Preparedness: A Return To The Rule Of Law, Wendy K. Mariner, George J. Annas, Wendy E. Parmet

Faculty Scholarship

Current discussions of pandemic influenza and emergency preparedness would do well to heed the lessons of US Airways flight 1549, which landed in the Hudson River in January 2009. This article examines what past emergencies teach us about how to prevent or control epidemics and argues that it is time for a return to the rule of law in pandemic preparedness. The most important resource in emergency preparedness is a healthy, resilient population, which depends importantly on sustainable systems of medical care and public health. Preparedness thus requires more money than law. After September 11, 2001, however, federal emergency preparedness …

Book Review Of “Populations, Public Health, And The Law,” Wendy E. Parmet (Georgetown University Press, Washington, D.C., 2009), Elizabeth Weeks Leonard

Scholarly Works

Wendy Parmet's new book, Populations, Public Health, and the Law, is a provocative, milestone contribution to the growing body of public health law scholarship. This article reviews this scholarly work.

Developmental Implications Of Children's Virtual Worlds, Kaveri Subrahmanyam

Washington and Lee Law Review

As virtual worlds for children increase in popularity, it is important to examine their developmental implications. Given the limited research on this question, we use extant social science research on youth and digital media to understand how children 's participation in virtual worlds might mediate their development. We identify four different pathways by which new media can potentially mediate development. Then we review relevant research on video games, which, like virtual worlds, contain three-dimensional online fantasy worlds; we also review research on online communication forums, which are like virtual worlds in that they allow users to create online selves and …

Detecting, Preventing, And Treating Sexually Transmitted Diseases Among Adolescent Arrestees: An Unmet Public Health Need, Steven Belenko, Richard Dembo, Matthew Rollie, Kristina Childs, Christopher Salvatore

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Studies of detained and incarcerated adolescent offenders in the United States indicate that these juveniles have an elevated risk of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). However, many more arrestees enter the “front end” of the juvenile justice system that is detained or incarcerated, and research into the STD risk profiles and service needs of this larger group is lacking. An expansion of STD testing (including of asymptomatic youths), prevention, and treatment is needed, as is improved knowledge about gender- and race-specific services. A pilot program in Florida has shown that juvenile justice and public health systems can collaborate to implement STD …

Do We Have An Agreement? Examining The Constitutionality And Legality Of The Security And Prosperity Partnership Of North America, And The Legal Ramifications Of Its Informality, R. Chris Van Landingham

Penn State International Law Review (1982 - 2011)

No abstract provided.

The State Of Mental Health Care In Post-Katrina New Orleans, Heather D'Antonio

Louisiana Law Review

No abstract provided.

Whatever Happened To Old Mac Donald's Farm… Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, Factory Farming And The Safety Of The Nation's Food Supply, Julie Follmer, Roseann B. Termini

Journal of Food Law & Policy

Today, livestock farming is a far stretch from the nostalgic notion of animals grazing in green pastures, roaming free in the fresh country air and returning at the end of the day to a cozy barn. Simply stated, livestock farming is a large scale business, where tens of thousands of animals are swiftly raised industrial-style for maximum profit. Under the "factory farm" model, large corporate owned operations grow quantities of animals for slaughter for human consumption as food. In fact, livestock farms now raise 40% of all animals in the United States.

Financial Crisis Containment, Anna Gelpern

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This Article maps financial crisis containment - extraordinary measures to stop the spread of financial distress - as a category of legal and policy choice. I make three claims.

First, containment is distinct from financial regulation, crisis prevention and resolution. Containment is brief; it targets the immediate term. It involves claims of emergency, rule-breaking, time inconsistency and moral hazard. In contrast, regulation, prevention and resolution seek to establish sound incentives for the long term. Second, containment decisions deviate from non-crisis norms in predictable ways, and are consistent across diverse countries and crises. Containment invariably entails three kinds of choices: choices …

Maritime Security Issues In Southeast Asia, An Indonesian Perspective, Nugroho Wisnumurti

Indonesian Journal of International Law

In this globalize world the new threats to security are civil violence, transnational organized crime, terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, poverty, deadly infectious disease and environmental degradation. Transnational Organized Crime emerges into a serious threat to national and international security and stability with an increasingly adverse economic and social impact on States and civil society. This paper will discuss maritime security issues relevant to the situation in Southeast Asia, particularly in Indonesia and in the Straits of Malacca and Singapore. This article will focus on trafficking in persons in the context of maritime security and its challenges in the …

Telework In The Federal Government: The Overview Memo, Workplace Flexibility 2010, Georgetown University Law Center

Memos and Fact Sheets

Flexible Work Arrangements (FWAs) alter the time and/or place that employees work on a regular basis in a manner that is manageable and predictable for both employees and employers.1 Telework, also called telecommuting, refers to an FWA that enables an employee to work from an alternative place to the employer’s usual worksite, typically home or a satellite work center. Telework technically refers to work performed with the use of a telecommunications connection to the workplace (e.g., computer, telephone), but the term is also

Sustainable Commerce: Public Health Law And Environmental Law Provide Tools For Industry And Government To Construct Globally-Competitive Green Economies, T. Rick Irvin, Peter A. Appel

Scholarly Works

This Article examines the legal mechanics underlying the sustainable commerce private/public governance paradigm whereby industry and government create sustainable commerce initiatives which coordinately grow local/state economies and employment, enhance local/state competitiveness in the global marketplace, and at the same time substantially improve local/state public health and environmental infrastructure. This includes an examination of the legal foundation for state/local sustainable commerce initiatives drawn from existing public health and environmental law and a review of two specific local/state sustainable commerce initiatives which have followed this paradigm with impressive results over a two-to-four year timeframe. Part II of this Article examines how public …

Priam's Lament: The Intersection Of Law And Morality In The Right To Burial And Its Need For Recognition In Post-Katrina New Orleans, Sarah Tomkins

University of the District of Columbia Law Review

Priam's lament might resound with those of us who saw certain images after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans three short years ago: bodies of beloved mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers dangling from house rafters and left to rot on street corners and in basements for months. The remaining unidentified victims were interred last summer at a new memorial, after spending the three years since Hurricane Katrina in a storage facility.3 How could this happen? In America, we might not expect the intercession of gods, but we do expect our government to set reasonable limits on human suffering. Were there just …

A Broader Liberty: Js Mill, Paternalism, And The Public’S Health, Lawrence O. Gostin, Kieran G. Gostin

O'Neill Institute Papers

Is the ‘harm principle’, famously propounded by JS Mill and widely adopted in bioethics, an appropriate principle to guide public health regulation? The harm principle limits liberty-limiting interventions to only those instances where the person poses a significant risk of harm to others. However, much of public health regulation is not primarily directed to avert risk to others, but to safeguard the health and safety of the individual him or herself. Think about regulations regarding seatbelts, motorcycle helmets, or the fluoridation of water as illustrations of pervasive public health regulations that are primarily intended to safeguard the individual’s own health …

Science, Politics, And Values: The Politicization Of Professional Practice Guidelines, Lawrence O. Gostin, John D. Kraemer

O'Neill Institute Papers

The Connecticut Attorney General’s recent allegations that the Infectious Disease Society of America violated antitrust law through its treatment guidelines for Lyme disease were neither based in sound science or appropriate legal judgment. Strong scientific evidence favors IDSA’s position that chronic infection with the etiologic agent of Lyme disease does not occur in the absence of objective signs of ongoing infection and that long-term antibiotic use to treat dubious infection, recommended in the quasi-scientific guidelines put forth by the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society (ILADS), are of no benefit. In siding with ILADS and other chronic Lyme disease advocates, …

Health Care-Associated Infections: Is There An End In Sight?, Lisa Sprague

National Health Policy Forum

Health care–associated infections (HAIs) have emerged as a significant concern in policy as well as clinical circles. An HAI is an infection acquired during treatment for another condition. Some of the HAI-causing bacteria have become drug-resistant; methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, is a familiar example. Tied to perhaps 100,000 deaths and $20 billion in health care costs each year, HAIs have given rise to state laws, legislative proposals at the federal level, public-private initiatives, and work at the hospital system and individual hospital level. However, much remains to be done. This issue brief reviews the prevalence of HAIs and the …

Immigrant Workers In The Massachusetts Health Care Industry: A Report On Status And Future Prospects, Ramon Borges-Mendez, James Jennings, Donna H. Friedman, Malo Hutson, Teresa Eliot Roberts

Center for Social Policy Publications

Given the vital picture of foreign-born health care workers, this study has the following objectives:

1. To document the labor market position of foreign-born workers in the sector at various levels (national, statewide, sub-regional) including patterns of occupational concentration during the last decade or so, prospects for occupational mobility, wages, geographic concentration, employment by type of establishment (hospitals, community health centers, etc.) and workforce development opportunities;
2. To document, whenever possible, the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of foreign-born workers in the sector, including country of origin and gender among others;
3. To document the qualitative contribution of foreign-born workers in the health care …

Water Scarcity, Conflict, And Security In A Climate Change World: Challenges And Opportunities For International Law And Policy, Gabriel Eckstein

Faculty Scholarship

Although climate change is expected to have major consequences that affect the global environment in its broadest sense, one of the earliest and most direct impacts will be on Earth’s fresh water systems. While some regions will experience increased precipitation, others will suffer serious scarcity. Among others, consequences are likely to include severe flooding, extreme droughts, and meandering border-rivers. This, in turn, will affect human migration patterns, population growths, agricultural activities, economic development, and the environment. This article explores the impact that climate change will have on regional and global freshwater resources and the resulting legal and policy implications that …

Happiness And Punishment (With J. Bronsteen & J. Masur), Christopher J. Buccafusco

All Faculty Scholarship

This article continues our project to apply groundbreaking new literature on the behavioral psychology of human happiness to some of the most deeply analyzed questions in law. Here we explain that the new psychological understandings of happiness interact in startling ways with the leading theories of criminal punishment. Punishment theorists, both retributivist and utilitarian, have failed to account for human beings' ability to adapt to changed circumstances, including fines and (surprisingly) imprisonment. At the same time, these theorists have largely ignored the severe hedonic losses brought about by the post-prison social and economic deprivations (unemployment, divorce, and disease) caused by …