Digital Commons Network^™

Inefficacy Of The Transparency In Coverage Final Rule In Promoting Cost-Effective Choices, Abigail Jaeger

Saint Louis University Journal of Health Law & Policy

The Transparency in Coverage Final Rule requires health plans to provide beneficiaries with financial information such as estimates of their personalized cost-sharing liabilities for items and services offered by different providers, the plan’s negotiated in-network rates with these providers, and the plan’s allowed out-of-network amounts. The Final Rule is designed to enhance consumers’ access to pricing information under their health plan so they have the ability to make well-informed and cost-effective decisions regarding their health care. However, empirical evidence suggests that the Final Rule will not effectuate its intended purpose. Many consumers lack the high level of health insurance comprehension …

Delta-Late: How The Contentious And Hazy Legal Status Of Delta-8 Thc Reveals Kentucky’S Need For Federal Regulatory Guidance, Georgiana Ledford

Kentucky Journal of Equine, Agriculture, & Natural Resources Law

No abstract provided.

What The Judge Ate For Breakfast: Reasonable Consumer Challenges In Misleading Food Labeling Claims, Jessica Guarino, Nabilah Nathani, A. Bryan Endres

Loyola Consumer Law Review

Food, being an established aspect of global human culture and history, occupies a unique role in contemporary society. Given the massive market available for packaged and processed food, companies have taken deceptive marketing to new heights, resulting in a flurry of consumer litigation. The dominant test for -evaluating the scope of these cases is the reasonable consumer standard, an amorphous assessment which requires a probability that a majority of the general public or targeted consumers would be misled by said deceptive marketing. By analyzing state and federal consumer protection statutes, landmark cases, and elements of human and cultural psychology, the …

Healthwashing: Corporate Communication Strategies In A Legal Gray Zone, Felix Delerm, Anna Galmiche, Melanie Levy

Loyola Consumer Law Review

In an age of rising prevalence of non-communicable diseases, transnational companies of the tobacco, alcohol, and food industries wash their risk-creating commercial activities and unhealthy products and incidentally mislead consumers. This paper examines industries' quest for legitimacy through elaborate communication strategies. It conceptualizes the practice of healthwashing as a new form of a commercial determinant of health, revealing the inherent tension between commercial and public health objectives. Healthwashing consists of deceptive, multi-level communication strategies, including labeling and advertising, that trick consumers into believing they support companies whose practices align with their values. The paper is the first to present an …

The Road To Autonomy, Nicole Mcconlogue

Faculty Scholarship

Scholars, activists, and advocates have long identified the “transportation gap” as a significant factor contributing to race- and class-based economic and other disparities. Carlessness correlates closely with race and poverty; meanwhile, widespread disinvestment in public transit results in low-income Black and Brown people suffering a disproportionate lack of access to opportunity and choice in almost every conceivable area of life.

State and local governments most often propose one of three solutions to correct the transportation gap: 1) renewing their investment in public transit; 2) increasing access to shared transit; and 3) making adaptations to the built environment. This Article demonstrates …

Protecting Low-Income Consumers In The Era Of Digital Grocery Shopping: Implications For Wic Online Ordering, Qi Zhang, Priyanka Patel, Caitlin M. Lowery

Community & Environmental Health Faculty Publications

The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) is now expected to allow participants to redeem their food benefits online, i.e., via online ordering, rather than only in-store. However, it is unclear how this new benefit redemption model may impact participants’ welfare since vendors may have an asymmetric information advantage compared with WIC customers. The WIC online ordering environment may also change the landscape for WIC vendors, which will eventually affect WIC participants. To protect WIC consumers’ rights in the new online ordering model, policymakers need an appropriate legal and regulatory framework. This narrative review provides that …

Regulating Organic, Sarah J. Morath

American University Law Review

Even highly regulated labels, such as the organic label, have the potential for greenwashing. As recently as January 2023, a grain seller was indicted in federal court for a $43 million scheme that involved the sale of non-organic grain as USDA-certified organic. But today’s organic market is also full of sellers who follow the current federal organic regulations but fail to demonstrate the spirit of the organic movement—forgoing soil, animal welfare, and community for profit. I call this nuanced form of greenwashing quasi-greenwashing. It arises when a business complies with a rule or standard but takes advantage of consumer misunderstanding …

A Contractual Relationship With Environmental Justice, Seema Kakade

American University Law Review

While corporations have long grappled with environmental issues, environmental justice is different. Corporations regularly manage compliance with environmental permits over a polluting facility’s long lifespan. Justice issues, however, are a fast-growing space for corporations as they wrestle with employee, government, customer, and public demands to step up for the communities that are directly impacted by the pollution their facilities produce. This Article explores the relationship between corporate polluters and impacted communities, with a focus on private-ordering tools like contracts. Such a focus enriches environmental justice law’s traditional focus on government decisionmakers, moving instead to corporate decision-making about where, how, and …

Facing Emergencies With Equity: Adopting Arpa's Emergency Rental Assistance Eligibility And Documentation Standards For Undocumented Individuals As A Model For Housing Stability, Gregory Zlotnick

Faculty Articles

Demand for federally funded housing programs vastly outpaces supply. Moreover, the supply of those programs has been limited in their scope: namely, to U.S. citizens and certain legal residents. A patchwork of federal statutes and regulations, stitched together over years, made clear that undocumented individuals-a group estimated to number around 11,000,000 in 2022-are ineligible for various kinds of federally subsidized housing.

As a result, undocumented individuals-an already-vulnerable class of residents-were even more vulnerable to housing instability when the COVID-19 pandemic reached the United States in 2020. Ineligible for short term resources, such as unemployment benefits, as well as longer-term supports, …

Fda's Revolving Door: Reckoning And Reform, Laura Karas

Articles

Recent controversy over the FDA's approval of the Alzheimer's therapy Aduhelm (aducanumab) and the Duchenne muscular dystrophy therapy Exondys 51 (eteplirsen) called into question the impartiality and independence of high-level FDA regulators. Atypical associations between FDA regulators and pharmaceutical company sponsors, in addition to fierce internal disputes over the adequacy of the evidence, elicited criticism and triggered concern about potential undue influence at the FDA. The revolving door is one persistent source of undue influence that overshadows the discharge of FDA regulators' duties to the public. Exit from government to private-sector employment via the "revolving door" is a frequent occurrence …

Situating Structural Challenges To Agency Authority Within The Framework Of The Finality Principle, Harold J. Krent

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Physicians Spreading Medical Misinformation: The Uneasy Case For Regulation, Richard S. Saver

Faculty Publications

Physicians have played a surprisingly prominent role in the current “infodemic” of false and misleading medical claims. Yet, state medical boards, the governmental agencies responsible for professional licensure and oversight, have sanctioned remarkably few physicians. Pushing back against the widespread criticism of medical boards for insufficient action, this Article questions the overall suitability of licensure regulation to police medical misinformation. First, uncertainty exists about medical boards’ jurisdiction and legal authority. Many misinformation claims have involved physicians communicating publicly, not while treating patients. Given the primarily patient-centered legal and ethical frameworks governing the practice of medicine, serious challenges arise in making …

The Perils Of Privatization: Exploring The Side Effects Of Privatized Correctional Health Care In Favor Of A Public Delivery Model, Peyton Holahan

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

On July 16, 2020, Judge Roslyn Silver of the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona set a trial between Arizona’s Department of Corrections and a class of Arizona’s prisoners alleging grossly inadequate health care in the state’s prison system. Arizona, like more than half of the states in the U.S., has outsourced prison health care to private correctional healthcare providers. While correctional healthcare providers win states over with promises of cost-effective care and limited liability, ever since the emergence of the correctional healthcare industry in the 1970s, problems with privatized health care in jails and prisons have persisted, …

On Fires, Floods, And Federalism, Andrew Hammond

UF Law Faculty Publications

In the United States, law condemns poor people to their fates in states. Where Americans live continues to dictate whether they can access cash, food, and medical assistance. What’s more, immigrants, territorial residents, and tribal members encounter deteriorated corners of the American welfare state. Nonetheless, despite repeated retrenchment efforts, this patchwork of programs has proven remarkably resilient. Yet, the ability of the United States to meet its people’s most basic needs now faces an unprecedented challenge: climate change. As extreme weather events like wildfires and hurricanes become more frequent and more intense, these climate-fueled disasters will displace and impoverish more …

Negligent Ai Speech: Some Thoughts About Duty, Jane R. Bambauer

UF Law Faculty Publications

Careless speech has always existed on a very large scale. When people talk, they often give bad advice or wrong information, and occasionally this leads the listener to act in a way that causes physical harm. The scale was made more visible by the public Internet as the musings and conversations of billions of participants became accessible and searchable to all. This dynamic produced a set of tort and free speech principles that we have debated and adjusted to over the last three decades.

AI speech systems bring a new dynamic. Unlike the disaggregated production of misinformation in the Internet …

Death After Dobbs, Kathy L. Cerminara

SMU Law Review

Courts have recognized that decisions about medical care near the end of life enjoy both common law and constitutional protections since the 1970s, when patients, their families, and the medical establishment invited legal input into those intensely private discussions. In Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health, the U.S. Supreme Court famously “strongly assumed” that substantive due process protected decisions to withhold or withdraw such treatment as arising from a fundamental liberty interest. Beginning on June 24, 2022, however, the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization prompted concern over whether substantive due process protection for end-of-life …

Gastrophysics And Intellectual Property Law: Analyzing The Legal And Market Effects Of A Reimagined Form Of Culinary Art And Science, Mark Edward Blankenship Jr.

South Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

Period Poverty And Life Strains: Efforts Made To Erase Stigma And To Expand Access To Menstrual Hygiene Products, Jennifer L. Brinkley, Nicole Niebuhr

Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality

No abstract provided.

The Antitrust Alternative: Promoting Public Health Through Competition, Michael Cederblom

Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality

No abstract provided.

Baker V. Women & Infants Hospital Of Rhode Island, 268 A.3d 1165 (R.I. 2022), Melissa Richi

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Future Of Anti-Poverty Legislation, Andrew Hammond, Ariel Jurow Kleiman, Gabriel Scheffler

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The era of big-government COVID relief is over. The initial pandemic- relief legislation, followed by two years of Democratic control in Washington, seemed to herald the expansion and modernization of the U.S. safety net. But sustained reform proved elusive. Now that this window of opportunity has closed, it’s time to step back and take stock. For those who focus on anti-poverty programs, one question persists: The next time there is such an opportunity to strengthen anti-poverty programs through legislation, how should federal law change?

This Article suggests the answer to that question lies in lessons from recent experience, including, but …

2022 Annual Survey: Recent Developments In Sports Law, Paul D. Kekich

Marquette Sports Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Review And Look Ahead At Criminalizing Pregnancy In The Name Of State Interest In Fetal Life, Sarah E. Burns, Sarah S. Wheeler

SMU Law Review

Across the United States, and especially in communities that are highly policed and in places hostile to abortion, pregnant people are dying, suffering, being separated from their children and families, and going to jail and prison in purported service of the state interest in fetal life recognized in Roe v. Wade and expanded in Planned Parenthood of Pennsylvania v. Casey. This Article focuses on two common practices that cause these harms: criminalizing pregnant people and denying them medical decision-making authority. While these practices are not new, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is …

Pregnancy Risk And Coerced Interventions After Dobbs, Elizabeth Kukura

SMU Law Review

Only nine months after the Supreme Court eliminated the federal constitutional right to abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, fourteen states had banned abortion entirely, and experts estimate the ultimate number of states imposing complete or near-complete restrictions on abortion care will likely rise to twenty-four. Millions of people with the capacity for pregnancy now (or will soon) live in places where getting pregnant means there is no choice other than to carry the pregnancy to term and give birth. One underappreciated, though critically important, impact of Dobbs is the extent to which newly enacted abortion restrictions will …

Regulating Subsidies Contributing To Overcapacity And Overfishing: How India Proposes To Align Trade Policy With Sustainable Fisheries, Pallavi Arora, Ketakee Gondane, Mumrita Gaurdwaj

Indian Journal of International Economic Law

In light of the growing impetus to integrate sustainability issues into the World Trade Organisation (WTO), facilitating coordination between the trade and sustainability regimes has taken centre stage. Managing regime interaction was integral to negotiating the Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies (AFS), the WTO’s first sustainability agreement. As the outstanding element of the AFS, the overcapacity and overfishing (OCOF) pillar also aims to foster harmony between the principles and concepts of international environmental law, particularly fisheries law and international trade law. Notable in this regard are the principles of sustainable development and common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities. Also relevant …

Food And Drug Regulation: Statutory And Regulatory Supplement (2023), Adam I. Muchmore

Faculty Scholarship

This Statutory and Regulatory Supplement is intended for use with its companion casebook, Food and Drug Regulation: A Statutory Approach (2021). This is not a traditional statutory supplement. Instead, it contains selected, aggressively edited provisions of the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act (FFDCA), related statutes, and the Code of Federal Regulations. The Supplement includes all provisions assigned as reading in the casebook, as well as a few additional provisions that some professors may wish to cover. The excerpts are designed to be teachable rather than

“Vancouver’S Favourite Country Music Pub,” Single Room Occupancy Hotels, And The Context Of International Frameworks: Mapping Vancouver’S Urban Law And Cultural Policy, Sara Gwendolyn Ross

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The public and private spaces of cities, their design, and the urban law and policy that shapes the lived spaces within cities provides a potent example of overlapping and often contested heritage(s) and heritage spaces that may have built heritage merit, may carry a high intangible value as gathering spaces for art, culture, and performance, or may be both characterized by their tangible and intangible heritage merit. The layers of diverging, contested, or interwoven heritage within the same urban spaces can diverge in what they mean to a group, community, or individual. They may represent significant moments of architectural grandeur, …

It Doesn't Matter What "Interpretation" Is, Francisco J. Urbina

Constitutional Commentary, Vol. 37 and later (2023–present)

No abstract provided.

Navigating Between "Politics As Usual" And Sacks Of Cash, Daniel C. Richman

Faculty Scholarship

Like other recent corruption reversals, Percoco was less about statutory text than what the Court deems “normal” politics. As prosecutors take the Court’s suggestions of alternative theories and use a statute it has largely ignored, the Court will have to reconcile its fears of partisan targeting and its textualist commitments

Black Boarding Academies As A Prudential Reparation: Finis Origine Pendet, Roy L. Brooks

Faculty Scholarship

With billions of dollars pledged and trillions of dollars demanded to redress slavery and Jim Crow (“Black Reparations”) the question of how best to use these funds has moved into the forefront of the ongoing campaign for racial justice in our post-civil rights society. Reparatory strategies typically target the norms and structures that sustain racial disadvantage wrought by slavery and Jim Crow. The goal of such transitional reparations is to extinguish the menace of white supremacy and systemic racism across the board. Restructuring in housing, education, employment, voting, law enforcement, health care, and the environment—social transformation—is absolutely needed in the …