Digital Commons Network^™

Access To Medicines, Brics Alliances, And Collective Action, Peter K. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

Most discussions on the public health implications of the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights focus on the right of less developed countries to issue compulsory licenses and the need for these countries to exploit flexibilities within the TRIPs Agreement. However, there are other means by which countries can enhance access to essential medicines. To provide an illustration of these other means, this article explores the possibility for greater collaboration among the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) and between these countries and other less developed countries.

This article begins by offering a brief …

Association Of Intervention Outcomes With Practice Capacity For Change: Subgroup Analysis From A Group Randomized Trial, Mary Ruhe, Sharon Weyer, Kurt C. Stange

Faculty Scholarship

Abstract. Background. The relationship between health care practices' capacity for change and the results and sustainability of interventions to improve health care delivery is unclear. Methods. In the setting of an intervention to increase preventive service delivery (PSD), we assessed practice capacity for change by rating motivation to change and instrumental ability to change on a one to four scale. After combining these ratings into a single score, random effects models tested its association with change in PSD rates from baseline to immediately after intervention completion and 12 months later. Results. Our measure of practices' capacity for change varied widely …

A Comparative Perspective On Immigration Law For Same-Sex Couples: How The United States Compares To Other Industrialized Democracies, James D. Wilets

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

What If Samuel D. Warren Hadn't Married A Senator's Daughter: Uncovering The Press Coverage That Led To The Right To Privacy, Amy Gajda

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Erisa, Agency Costs, And The Future Of Health Care In The United States, John Bronsteen, Brendan S. Maher, Peter K. Stris

Faculty Scholarship

Because so many Americans receive health insurance through their employers, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) plays a dominant role in the delivery of healthcare in the United States. The ERISA system enables employers and insurers to save money by providing inadequate healthcare to employees, thereby creating incentives for these agents to act contrary to the interests of their principals. Such agency costs play a significant role in the current healthcare crisis and require attention when considering reform. We evaluate the two major healthcare reform movements by exploring the extent to which each reduces agency costs. We …

Examples Of The Political Character Of International Water Law, Gabriel E. Eckstein

Faculty Scholarship

It is widely known that over a billion people lack access to potable water, and well over twice that number are without adequate sanitation'-the latter situation often being related to the former. It has been calculated that every eight seconds a child dies of water-related causes-a stunning statistic and an absolutely unacceptable state of affairs.

While much has been made of the prospect of global water shortages, what is perhaps not so well known is that most of the world's fresh water is shared by two or more states. There are more than 260 international drainage basins, which account for …

Lawyers With Disabilities: L'Handicape C'Est Nous, Anita Bernstein

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Due Process And Punitive Damages: An Economic Approach, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

This paper sets out a public choice (rent-seeking) theory of the Due Process Clause, which implies that the function of the clause is to prevent takings through the legislative or common law process. This view of the clause's function supports a preference for expanding rather than contracting the set of entitlements protected by the clause. The Supreme Court's application of due process reasoning in the punitive damages case law is in some respects consistent and in other respects inconsistent with this theory. For the most part, the Court has failed to develop a set of doctrines that would enable lower …

Social Solidarity And Personal Responsibility In Health Reform, Wendy K. Mariner

Faculty Scholarship

In the United States, calls to expand access to health care, when not simply ignored, typically result in bills or legislation to reform health insurance. We are in the midst of just such a cycle today. Several states have adopted reform laws to make insurance available to most of their residents. Presidential candidates are offering their own proposals for the nation's health care system. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill even declared that health care should be a right, adding that wealthier people should help pay for those who will never be able to afford their own care. Most Americans cannot …

The Private Enforcement Of Immigration Laws, Huyen Pham

Faculty Scholarship

To be sure, the lion's share of immigration enforcement still rests with government authorities. But there is a growing trend to shift some enforcement responsibilities onto private parties. With the passing of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), Congress took the significant step of requiring employers to check the immigration status of all employees in order to verify their work eligibility. For the first time nationwide, private parties were required to deny a benefit--here, employment--based on immigration status. In effect then, IRCA required employer's to enforce the employment provisions of federal immigration laws. medical care providers, and …

Proof Brief Of Professors Of Family Law And Jurisprudence As Amici Curiae In Support Of Plaintiff-Appellee, Joseph M. Barron, Richard T. Greenberg, Shannon Price Minter, Carlos A. Ball, Naomi Cahn, June Carbone, Ann Laquer Estin, Joan Heifetz Hollinger, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Sarah H. Ramsey, Michael S. Wald

Faculty Scholarship

The plaintiffs in this case met their burden of demonstrating the irrationality of Iowa’s statutory exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage. They did this, in part, by presenting social science research regarding the irrelevance of sexual orientation to parental ability and the psychological and social well-being of children raised by same-sex parents. In addition to arguing that the marriage exclusion is irrational, the plaintiffs also alleged that the exclusion should be subject to heightened scrutiny because it violates the fundamental right to marry and discriminates on the bases of gender and sexual orientation. Amici agree that the exclusion of same-sex …

Health State Valuation In Mild To Moderate Cognitive Impairment: Feasibility Of Computer-Based, Direct Patient Utility Assessment, Neal V. Dawson, Mendel E. Singer, Marian B. Patterson, Susie A. Sami, Iahn Gonsenhouser, Heather A. Lindstrom, Kathleen A. Smyth, Melissa Barber Butson, Peter J. Whitehouse

Faculty Scholarship

Background. Most patients with dementia will, at some point, need a proxy health care decision maker. It is unknown whether persons with various degrees of cognitive impairment can reliably report their health-related preferences. Methods. The authors performed health state valuations (HSVs) of current and hypothetical future health states on 47 pairs of patients with mild to moderate cognitive impairment and their caregivers using computer-based standard gamble, time tradeoff, and rating scale techniques. Results. Patients' mean (SD) age was 74.6 (9.3) years. About half of the patients were women (48%), as were most caregivers (73%), who were on average younger (mean …

Space To Learn And Grow: Assessing The Capacity Of A Regional Early Care And Education System, Robert L. Fischer, Kristen Mikelbank, Claudia J. Coulton

Faculty Scholarship

As communities across the United States work to meet the early care and education needs of young children, more research is needed to inform decision making at many levels. One key dimension of this is having clarity about the relative availability of care in light of demographic trends and geographic dispersion. The present study demonstrates a method to examine the capacity of early care programs to serve the children in a large urban county. The study takes stock of the existing early care system by comparing where the child care slots are and where the demand is—all at the neighborhood …

Strangers In A Strange Land: Specialized Courts Resolving Patent Disputes, Lawrence M. Sung

Faculty Scholarship

As the number of cases and disputes involving proprietary technology subject to intellectual property rights has increased in recent years, a decades-old view that such matters should be adjudicated exclusively by specialized courts and judges has experienced a renaissance. This call for specialized, or problem-solving, courts at both the federal and state levels is not unique to the intellectual property field, however. Indeed, there has been a significant movement over the past several years to establish specialized drug courts, community courts, mental health courts, and domestic violence courts. One common element among these efforts is the idea that specialized courts …

Teaching International Intellectual Property Law, Peter K. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

Intellectual property law was in the backwater only a few decades ago. The Section on Intellectual Property Law of the Association of American Law Schools was not even founded until the early 1980s, and the creation of intellectual property specialty programs has been only a recent phenomenon. As senior legal scholars reminisce, early in their career, they would have been lucky to find a school that would allow them to teach a class on intellectual property law. Although intellectual property law teaching has come of age in the past decade, international intellectual property law courses remain nonexistent in more than …

Three Questions That Will Make You Rethink The U.S.-China Intellectual Property Debate, Peter K. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

The debate on China's piracy and counterfeiting problems has been ongoing for more than two decades. However, in the past few years, this debate has taken on a new sense of urgency and significance. In August 2008, the City of Beijing will host the Summer Olympic Games. Two years later, the 2010 World Expo will be held in Shanghai. In addition, two World Trade Organization dispute settlement panels were recently established to resolve disputes between China and the United States over inadequate enforcement of intellectual property rights and inadequate market access to U.S. media products. All of these developments, of …

Incorporating Ethnicity Into Genetic Risk Assessment For Alzheimer Disease: The Reveal Study Experience, Peter J. Whitehouse, Melissa Barber Butson

Faculty Scholarship

PURPOSE: To describe how investigators in a multisite randomized clinical trial addressed scientific and ethical issues involved in creating risk models based on genetic testing for African American participants. METHODS: The following informed our decision whether to stratify risk assessment by ethnicity: evaluation of epidemiological data, appraisal of benefits and risks of incorporating ethnicity into calculations, and feasibility of creating ethnicity-specific risk curves. Once the decision was made, risk curves were created based on data from a large, diverse study of first-degree relatives of patients with Alzheimer disease. RESULTS: Review of epidemiological data suggested notable differences in risk between African …

Misplaced Jurisdiction, Kevin Washburn

Faculty Scholarship

Interview discussing felonies and jurisdiction on Tribal land.

Antitrust And Nonprofit Hospital Mergers: A Return To Basics, Barak D. Richman

Faculty Scholarship

Courts reviewing proposed mergers of nonprofit hospitals have too often abandoned the bedrock principles of antitrust law, failing to pay heed to the most elemental hallmarks of socially beneficial competition. This Article suggests that courts’ misapplication of antitrust law in these cases reflects a failure to understand the structural details of the American health care market. After reviewing recent cases in which courts have rejected challenges to proposed mergers between nonprofit hospitals, it documents how courts have engaged in a faulty analysis that ultimately protects nonprofit hospitals from the rigors of standard antitrust scrutiny. It then identifies the core principles …

Insurance Expansions: Do They Hurt Those They Are Designed To Help?, Barak D. Richman

Faculty Scholarship

Seeking to redress health disparities across income and race, many policy-makers mandate health insurance benefits, presuming that equalized benefits will help equalize use of beneficial health services. This paper tests that presumption by measuring health care use by a diverse population with comprehensive health insurance. Focusing on use of mental health care and pharmaceuticals, it finds that even when insurance benefits and access are constant, whites and those with high incomes consume more of these benefits than other people do. This suggests that privileged classes extract more health care services even when everyone pays equal premiums for equal insurance coverage.

Taking It To Scale: Evaluating The Scope And Reach Of A Community-Wide Initiative On Early Childhood, Robert L. Fischer, Nina Lalich, Claudia J. Coulton

Faculty Scholarship

In implementing broad community initiatives, the ability to assess the delivery of services is a distinct challenge. Yet, understanding both the magnitude and cross-usage of services by target populations is often a precursor to effective program evaluation, program improvement and additional program planning. This research examines the extent to which a comprehensive early childhood initiative successfully reached young children and their families in a large urban county. By linking birth records and administrative datasets at the level of the individual child, the study tracks the experiences of children in respect to engagement in program services and their receipt of public …

From Making Money Without Doing Evil To Doing Good Without Handouts: The Google.Org Experiment In Philanthropy, Shruti Rana

Faculty Scholarship

From its inception, Google has promoted itself as a company that dares to be different in its pursuit of innovation and information. The company’s new philanthropic arm, Google.org, promises to be just as pioneering in its search for social returns through the mechanism of profit. This Essay takes a closer look at the Google.org experiment in philanthropy. It argues that Google.org’s uniqueness lies not in its “hybrid” model that merges for-profit and charitable aims, but in the ways it seeks to use market mechanisms to harness the social benefits of information technology for the public good. Google.org also has enormous …

This Is The End… My Friend: Disgorgement, Dissolution And Sequestration As Remedies Under State Udap Statutes, Michael Flynn

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Of Prophets And Proselytes: Freedom Of Religion And The Conflict Of Rights In International Law, Peter G. Danchin

Faculty Scholarship

The case of proselytism presents a tangle of competing claims: on the one hand, the rights of proselytizers to free exercise of religion and freedom of speech; on the other hand, the rights of targets of proselytism to change their religion, peacefully to have or maintain a particular religious tradition, and to be free from injury to religious feelings. Clashes between these claims of right are today generating acute tensions in relations between States and peoples, a state of affairs starkly illustrated by the recent Danish cartoons controversy. Irrespective of their resolution in any particular domestic legal system, how should …

Open Code Governance, Danielle Keats Citron

Faculty Scholarship

Automated information systems offer an opportunity to improve the democratic legitimacy of the administrative state. Today, agencies transfer crucial responsibilities to computer systems. Computers gather and interpret important information. For instance, electronic machines record and calculate votes. Automated systems execute policy and render decisions about important individual rights, such as a person’s eligibility for public benefits. Computer systems store sensitive personal information. These systems’ closed architecture, however, shields vital agency decisions from view. No one can see how a system operates without a software program’s source code. Closed code hides programming errors that disenfranchise voters, under-count communities for the census, …

Suspect Symbols: Value Pluralism As A Theory Of Religious Freedom In International Law, Peter G. Danchin

Faculty Scholarship

The grounds upon which states may limit the freedom to manifest religion or belief are divisive questions in constitutional and international law. The focus of recent inquiry has been on laws which proscribe the wearing of religious symbols in certain aspects of the public sphere, and on the claims more generally to religious and cultural freedom of Muslim minorities in European nation-states. Stepping back from these debates, this Article aims at a more rigorous theoretical treatment of the subject. It asks whether there is a coherent notion of religious freedom in international legal theory and, if not, why not? In …

The Role And Legal Status Of Health Care Ethics Committees In The United States, Diane E. Hoffmann, Anita J. Tarzian

Faculty Scholarship

Over a quarter of a century has passed since health care ethics committees (HCECs) in the United States received legal recognition as alternatives to the courts in resolving conflicts related to patient end-of-life care. By the mid to late 1980s HCECs had been established in over half of U.S. hospitals and had received a certain legitimacy in the health care system. Given their age and growth one could characterize them developmentally as emerging from adolescence and establishing themselves in young adult-hood. As a result, we might expect that they would have resolved the identify crisis characterizing the adolescent years. Yet, …

Nepad And The Rebirth Of Development Theory And Praxis, Maxwell O. Chibundu

Faculty Scholarship

The Black man’s burden again has become the world’s. Not since the early part of the 1960s has the well-being of the Dark Continent attracted the level of attention that it is now generating. Spurred by a variety of motives, including humanitarianism and concerns over the potential of so-called failed states as safe harbours for transnational terrorism, the welfare of the continent has become the special concern of G8 summit meetings. The United Nations Security Council now routinely adopts mandatory resolutions under Chapter VII that expressly and in fine detail regulate military, diplomatic, legal and even commercial interactions with the …

Survey Of The Law Of Cyberspace: Electronic Contracting Cases 2007-2008, Juliet M. Moringiello, William L. Reynolds

Faculty Scholarship

In this survey, we discuss electronic contracting cases decided between July 1, 2007 and June 30, 2008. In addition to cases adding to the literature on the enforceability of online contracts, this survey includes cases discussing modification of online contracts, incorporation by reference, and unconscionability. We conclude that our common law is developing nicely to address the issues presented by internet contracting.

The Right Of Public Participation In The Law-Making Process And The Role Of The Legislature In The Promotion Of This Right, Karen Czapanskiy, Rashida Manjoo

Faculty Scholarship

In 2006, the South African Constitutional Court found a constitutional right to participate in the legislative process in the case of Doctors for Life, Case CCT 12/05 (decided 17 August 2006). In this article, we argue that, first, legislation is better when legislators are required to invite and attend to public input, and, second, citizenship is better when legislators are required to invite and attend to public input. Doctors for Life puts South Africa on the road to improving both legislation and citizenship. In the United States, this road is largely untraveled. While rejecting traditional representative democracy as an adequate …