Digital Commons Network^™

Service Pays: Creating Opportunities By Linking College With Public Service, Ganesh Sitaraman, Elizabeth Warren, Sandy Baum

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

If college is to be the gateway to security and success, then a new financing mechanism is essential, one that lets students take responsibility for the cost of their own educations without burdening their families unduly, forcing them into career choices that push them out of public service, or mortgaging their futures. Our Service Pays proposal is designed to give every student who wants to work hard a means of paying for college - and to give young people an economically viable option to engage in public service for a few years after college. After describing the high costs of …

Lessons From Katrina: Response, Recovery And The Public Health Infrastructure, Elizabeth Weeks

Scholarly Works

This paper was presented at DePaul University in March 2006, as part of a Symposium on Shaping a New Direction for Law and Medicine: An International Debate on Culture, Disaster, Biotechnology & Public Health. Following the catastrophic events of 2005, including Hurricane Katrina, Pakistani Earthquakes, bird flu transmission to human populations, and the real threat of bioterrorism, government struggled in the aftermath to make sense of the devastation and human displacement. Medical teams, try as they might, are not always prepared and alerted as to how best investigate and quickly render assistance. The Symposium addressed the role of government, policy-makers, …

Open Source Biology: A Means To Address The Access & Research Gaps, Katherine M. Nolan-Stevaux

Santa Clara High Technology Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Global Health And Human Rights Imperative, Patricia C. Kuszler

Articles

Open any magazine, click on a television news channel, or surf the net and you are likely to find global health highlighted as one of the foremost challenges of new millennium. First, this article will consider the meaning and measures of global health and detail the path to improved health and development prescribed by the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. Second, it will trace the development of international human rights law as it relates to health. Third, it demonstrate how human rights and health, long traversing parallel routes, are in fact converging in the 21st Century quest for global health–a …

Title Iii Of The Bioterrorism Act: Sacrificing U.S. Trade Relations In The Name Of Food Security, Claire S. Boisen

American University Law Review

Part I examines in detail the two conflicting laws that are the basis of this Comment—Title III of the Bioterrorism Act and the SPS Agreement—focusing on those portions of Title III that adversely impact international trade. Part I also presents the WTO case EC Measures Concerning Meat and Meat Products (Hormones), the first food regulation case disputed in the WTO system for a violation of the SPS Agreement. This case clarified the two major principles of the SPS Agreement that are explored in this Comment: the prohibition on discrimination and the obligation to support trade–restrictive measures with an analytical risk …

Law As A Tool To Facilitate Healthier Lifestyles And Prevent Obesity, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Public health agencies face considerable challenges trying to prevent overweight and obesity in society, primarily because a person's own behavior is often the root cause of the disease. Individuals make personal choices about their diet, exercise, and lifestyle, so disease is often thought of as a matter of personal, not governmental, responsibility. This Commentary shows how law can be used as a tool to prevent overweight and obesity (see Table).

The tools discussed in this article include:

- Disclosure - e.g., labels and consumer information

- Tort liability - e.g., inadequate disclosure of risks, misleading advertisements, and targeting children

- …

Administering The Clean Water Act: Do Regulators Have "Bigger Fish To Fry" When It Comes To Addressing The Practice Of Chumming On The Chesapeake Bay?, Hope M. Babcock

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Chesapeake Bay is one of the country's most productive estuaries. However, for decades the health of the Bay has been declining due in large part to nutrification. Excessive nutrients encourage algal blooms, which lower dissolved oxygen and increase turbidity in the Bay's waters. More than 40% of the Bay's main stern is now dead largely as a result of this problem. The practice of chumming, the discarding of baitfish, usually menhaden, over the sides of fishing boats to attract game fish like striped bass, is contributing to the Bay's nutrification problem because the decomposing chum raises the waters biological …

Public-Private Health Law: Multiple Directions In Public Health, Nan D. Hunter

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

No public law is more public than public health law. Its defining subject is the use of state power to control and prevent death and disease. Its primary institutions are a cluster of state actors, the governmental agencies that comprise the American public health "system.,, The system grew out of the eighteenth century boards of health that produced the beginnings of administrative law. Public health law is grounded on statutory provisions that authorize various forms of state action and on judicial decisions that resolve constitutional challenges to those actions.

A Theory And Definition Of Public Health Law, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

I offer a brief excerpt from my book, Public Health Law: Power, Duty, Restraint. My definition of public health law follows, and the remainder of this excerpt offers a justification as well as an expansion of the ideas presented: Public health law is the study of the legal powers and duties of the state, in collaboration with its partners (e.g., health care, business, the community, the media, and academe), to assure the conditions for people to be healthy (to identify, prevent, and ameliorate risks to health in the population) and the limitations on the power of the state to constrain …

Multinational Enterprises And Workplace Reproductive Health: Extending Corporate Social Responsibility, Rebecca K. Atkins

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Corporate social responsibility is a relatively new approach to the protection of human rights. While the human rights to whole-body health and workplace health are long-standing, the right to reproductive health is a new topic of discussion. This Note examines the right to reproductive health in the workplace and proposes that it would be best protected by imposing an affirmative duty on multi-national enterprises via corporate social responsibility. Origins of human rights, corporate social responsibility, and reproductive health are discussed before turning to the developing stalemate between multi-national enterprises and less developed countries.

Attack Of The Balloon People, Keith E. Sealing

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Any discussion of food security would, at first blush, seem to focus primarily on world hunger and other threats to the safety of the food supply, whether intentionally man-made (e.g., terrorism), inadvertently man-made (e.g., global warming), made-for-profit by industrial agriculture (referred to as "industrial food" throughout this Article), or "natural" although arguably man-abetted (such as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease). And hunger is indeed a problem and likely to become more of a problem. However, this Article focuses on the long term threat to world health and world food security caused by the American way of eating; the …

Food Safety, South-North Asymmetries, And The Clash Of Regulatory Regimes, Obijiofor Aginam

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

This Article explores the globalization of food safety concerns driven by the phenomenon of economic globalization, and the "legalization" of food safety disputes within the rules-based architecture of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Focusing on the interaction between WTO norms and the treaties of other multilateral organizations, the Article discusses the implications of the "clash of food safety regulatory regimes" for South-North asymmetrical relations between the rich and poor countries. The Article also discusses global economic diplomacy and the emerging WTO jurisprudence on the Agreement on Sanitary and Phyto-Sanitary Measures (SPS) disputes. This Article explores both the perceived and actual …

Foodborne Infections And The Global Food Supply: Improving Health At Home And Abroad, Robert V. Tauxe

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

In recent years, fourteen percent of the U.S. food supply has been imported from other countries, including many fresh and perishable foods. Although most outbreaks of illness and individual cases are related to foods from the United States, large and unusual outbreaks have been traced to imported foods that were likely contaminated in the country of origin. Investigation of these outbreaks requires collaboration across several disciplines as well as across international borders. Successful investigation can not only control the original problem, but can also inform public authorities in both countries about the need for strategies to prevent similar outbreaks from …

Response Is Local, Relief Is Not: The Pervasive Impact Of Agro Terrorism, Asha M. George

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Agro terrorism is a threat facing the public today. National response systems are not yet able to perform efficiently and effectively to address this threat. Any locality can be targeted, and the immediate response will come from local entities, regardless of how adequately prepared they are to respond. Knowing that acts of agro terrorism are both expected and feasible today, we must alter our prevention, deterrence, preparedness, detection, response, attribution, recovery, and mitigation programs and base them on a better understanding of the threat. There are a number of things we can do in advance of agro terrorism, none of …

International Cooperation To Defend The Food Supply Chain, John T. Hoffman, Shaun Kennedy

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Global Food System Defense is an area where, so far, we have not yet obtained real traction in this post-September 11, 2001 world of international terrorism. Cooperative international efforts to defend and protect the global food supply system may well be crucial to the security of every developed nation in the coming years. Affordable energy--currently fossil fuels--and food are at the heart of the security and prosperity of every nation. Yet the food protection efforts that have been historically supported by the international community have focused on traditional "food security," defined as access to sufficient calories and nutrition to sustain …

Public Relations Perspective To Manage Conflict In A Public Health Crisis, A, Qi Qiu, Glen T. Cameron

Journal of Dispute Resolution

The present study particularly focuses on the SARS outbreak in China because it was a major battlefield against the disease that largely affected the fate of the worldwide SARS crisis. Framing analysis of media coverage of the SARS epidemic and organization information from the WHO is used to dissect specific conflicts and strategies involved in China's SARS crisis. The discussion finishes with a checklist for planning strategic communication and conflict management during public health crises.

Medicine And Public Health: Crossing Legal Boundaries, Wendy K. Mariner

Faculty Scholarship

In 2006, New York City began a mandatory reporting system for laboratories to submit blood sugar (A1c) test results (primarily for diabetes) to the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene without the patient's consent. This article examines whether this new program is an innovative way to improve New Yorkers' health, an invasion of medical privacy, or usurpation of the physician's role. The registry is an example of public health initiatives in chronic diseases, which challenge the limits of laws governing medicine care and public health programs by blurring the historical boundaries between them.

Will Longer Antimicrobial Patents Improve Global Public Health?, Kevin Outterson, Julie Balach Samora, Karen Keller-Cuda

Faculty Scholarship

The problem of antimicrobial resistance has led some infectious disease experts and their professional societies to propose the use of transferable intellectual property rights (wildcard patents) and patent term extensions as methods to encourage antimicrobial R&D. We evaluate recent approvals of new antimicrobial classes and find the number of new introductions is higher than previously suggested. More importantly, creating new patent rights is shown to be an inefficient and possibly counterproductive response to antimicrobial resistance. Wildcard patents would operate as a more than US$40 billion annual tax on heart disease, hypertension, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma, and depression to inefficiently …

The Debtor-Patient Revisited, Melissa B. Jacoby

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Savings Clauses And Trends In Natural Resources Federalism, Robert L. Fischman, Angela King

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This article considers recent trends in federalism, with particular attention to natural resource law's statutory savings clauses. It begins with a case study of elk management in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The elk controversy shows how a statutory savings clause can provide a state with traction to advance its interests, and demonstrates how the political winds of change can shift the balance of state-federal relations. The article then focuses on the common statutory savings clauses and their roles in circumscribing federal agency authority and establishing a basis for cooperation between federal and state governments. We analyze the interpretive approaches the judiciary …

Architecture Amidst Anarchy: Global Health's Quest For Governance, David Fidler

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Increased concern about global health has focused attention on governance questions, and calls for new governance architecture for global health have appeared. This article examines the growing demand for such architecture and argues that the architecture metaphor is inapt for understanding the challenges global health faces. In addition to traditional problems experienced in coordinating State behavior, global health governance faces a new problem, what I call “open-source anarchy.” The dynamics of open-source anarchy are such that States and non-State actors resist governance reforms that would restrict their freedom of action. In this context, what is emerging is not governance architecture …

Through The Quarantine Looking Glass: Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis And Public Health Governance, Law, And Ethics, David P. Fidler, Lawrence O. Gostin, Howard Markel

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Extensively Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis: An Isolation Order, Public Health Powers, And A Global Crisis, David P. Fidler, Howard Markel, Lawrence O. Gostin

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Governing Catastrophes: Security, Health And Humanitarian Assistance, David P. Fidler

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Recent catastrophes, and predictions of an increasing potential for more, have stimulated thinking about the best policy responses to these threats. This article explores how security concepts influence catastrophe governance. The article considers how globalization affects thinking about catastrophes and describes ways in which catastrophes have been conceptualized as governance challenges, such as the human rights approach to the provision of health and humanitarian assistance. The article explains how health and humanitarian assistance experienced ‘‘securitization’’ in the post-cold war period, a development that challenges rights-based strategies and creates complex and controversial implications for the prevention, protection and response functions of …

Xdr Tuberculosis, The New International Health Regulations, And Human Rights, David P. Fidler, Philippe Calain

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

2007-06-18 H. Thomas Wells, Jr. Aba Presidential Speech, H. Thomas Wells Jr., University Of Alabama School Of Law

H. Thomas Wells, Jr. ABA President (2008-2009) Collection Speeches

No abstract provided.

Private And Public Necessity And The Violation Of Property Rights, John Alan Cohan

North Dakota Law Review

No abstract provided.

Pandemic Influenza: Ethics, Law, And The Public's Health, Lawrence O. Gostin, Benjamin E. Berkman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Highly pathogenic Influenza (HPAI) has captured the close attention of policy makers who regard pandemic influenza as a national security threat. Although the prevalence is currently very low, recent evidence that the 1918 pandemic was caused by an avian influenza virus lends credence to the theory that current outbreaks could have pandemic potential. If the threat becomes a reality, massive loss of life and economic disruption would ensue. Therapeutic countermeasures (e.g., vaccines and antiviral medications) and public health interventions (e.g., infection control, social separation, and quarantine) form the two principal strategies for prevention and response, both of which present formidable …

Advancing The Rule Of Law: Report On The International Rule Of Law Symposium Convened By The American Bar Association November 9-10, 2005, Katharina Pistor

Faculty Scholarship

The American Bar Association hosted the first International Rule of Law Symposium in Washington, D.C. on November 9-10, 2005. The Symposium brought together representatives from all over the world who share a common interest in advancing the rule of law as a means to tackle major obstacles that hamper social and economic growth and development around the globe. Some were ministers and government officials, others entrepreneurs and business people, yet others represented non-governmental organizations or employees of multilateral donor organizations. The topics addressed at the Symposium were equally far reaching in scope, covering everything from poverty alleviation and improving public …

Social Contagion Of Violence, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Deanna L. Wilkinson, Garth Davies

Faculty Scholarship

In this chapter, we assess whether the roller-coaster pattern of homicides in New York City beginning in 1985 fits a contagion model and identify mechanisms of social contagion that predict its spread across social and physical space. This framework for interpreting the homicide trends as an epidemic includes two perspectives. First, the sharp rise and fall are indicative of a nonlinear pattern in which the phenomenon spreads at a rate far beyond what would be predicted by exposure to some external factor and declines in a similar pattern in which the reduction from year to year exceeds what might be …