Digital Commons Network^™

Genetic Information, Privacy And Insolvency, Edward J. Janger

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Jacobson V Massachusetts: It's Not Your Great-Great-Grandfather's Public Health Law, Wendy K. Mariner, George J. Annas, Leonard H. Glantz

Faculty Scholarship

Jacobson v Massachusetts, a 1905 US Supreme Court decision, raised questions about the power of state government to protect the public’s health and the Constitution’s protection of personal liberty. We examined conceptions about state power and personal liberty in Jacobson and later cases that expanded, superseded, or even ignored those ideas.

Public health and constitutional law have evolved to better protect both health and human rights. States’ sovereign power to make laws of all kinds has not changed in the past century. What has changed is the Court’s recognition of the importance of individual liberty and how it limits …

Prolegomenon To Any Future Administrative Law Course: Separation Of Powers And The Transcendental Deduction, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

Federal constitutional law has a way of worming itself into just about every crevice of the law school curriculum. Civil Procedure students grapple with the Due Process Clauses, Property students ponder the Takings Clause, and Torts students must reckon with issues of federal preemption and legislative power. But few courses outside the mainstream Constitutional Law curriculum require as much sustained attention to constitutional issues as does Administrative Law.' Administrative Law courses typically involve an extensive study of procedural due process.2 They also engage, at least peripherally, in some of the most fundamental and long-lived constitutional controversies in the law of …

Law And Public Health: Beyond Emergency Preparedness, Wendy K. Mariner

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines three questions: What is public health? What is public health law? What roles can lawyers play in public health? It first describes the breadth of public health, highlighting six trends shaping its future: social determinants of health; synergy between medicine and public health; shifts in focus from external (e.g., environmental and social) to internal (behavioral) risks to health; federalization of public health law; globalization of health risks and responses; and bioterrorism. Because the domains of law that apply to public health are equally broad, the Article next offers a conceptual framework for identifying the types of laws …

Protecting Protected Speech: First Amendment Taxonomy And The Food And Drug Administration's Regulation Of "Enduring Materials", Daniel J. Gilman

Faculty Scholarship

Numerous comments have called upon the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to exercise restraint in its treatment of the dissemination of “enduring materials” (e.g., textbooks, journal articles, etc.) that address off-label uses of drug or biological products. This article considers the constitutional protections that apply to enduring materials as examples of commercial speech, and questions whether such materials—even though distributed by manufacturers—might be viewed more properly as scientific speech. Four conclusions will be set forth: 1) enduring materials regarding off-label uses deserve at least as much protection as the Constitution affords commercial speech; 2) there are good reasons to think …

Civil Legal Needs Of Individuals In Drug Treatment, Ellen M. Weber, Rachel C. Grunberger, Kevin E. O'Grady, Amelia M. Arria

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Environmental Justice, Eileen Gauna, Catherine A. O'Neill, Clifford Rechtschaffen

Faculty Scholarship

This white paper describes briefly the remarkable journey of community-based environmental justice advocates over the last 15 years and their impact on environmental regulation. It will also describe some of the empirical evidence of disparities and the regulatory dynamics that make these inequities an intractable problem, despite the collective efforts of grassroots leaders, environmental justice organizations, public interest law firms, and governmental officials. The paper then focuses on one important set of issues that must be tackled in order to achieve environmental justice: those involving injustice in risk regulation. We strive in this white paper, as allies in this collective …

Intellectual Property And The Information Ecosystem, Peter K. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

This short essay proceeds in two parts. The first part examines the controversy surrounding the use of the term intellectual property. It discusses the common criticisms of the term's usage, including those articulated by Richard Stallman. It also challenges the myth that intellectual property did not acquire any property attributes until the establishment of the World Intellectual Property Organization. The essay suggests that the term may remain in common usage despite its uneasy analogy to real property, and a more nuanced understanding of property law may alleviate some of the problems caused by using the term.

The second part focuses …

Destabilizing The Normalization Of Rural Black Land Loss: A Critical Role For Legal Empiricism, Thomas W. Mitchell

Faculty Scholarship

Mitchell's study exemplifies the New Legal Realist goal of combining qualitative and quantitative empirical research to shed light on important legal and policy issues. He also demonstrates the utility of a ground-level contextual analysis that examines legal problems from the bottom up. The study tracks processes by which black rural landowners have gradually been dispossessed of more than 90% of the land held by their predecessors in 1910. Mitchell points out that despite the continuing practices that contribute to this problem, there has been very little research on the issue, and what little attention legal scholars have paid to it …

A Short And Plain Solution To The Medical Malpractice Crisis: Why Charles E. Clark Remains Prophetically Correct About Special Pleading And The Big Case, Mary Margaret Penrose, Dace A. Caldwell

Faculty Scholarship

Antitrust. Patent infringement. Civil rights. Employment discrimination. And now, medical malpractice. The common thread among each of these categories of cases is that judges and advocates have, at one time or another, sought to elevate the pleading requirements in federal court for these so-called "big cases." To date, every such effort has failed.6 But none of the previous attempts have garnered the wide range of support now coming from such influential sources as the majority of physicians, Congress, and the President of the United States.

Our country is in the middle of a similar predicament-a medical malpractice crisis that is …

The One-Stop-Shop For Vat And Rst: Common Approaches To Eu-U.S. Consumption Tax Issues, Richard Thompson Ainsworth

Faculty Scholarship

In March 2004 the European Commission solicited comments on a proposal to simplify value added tax (VAT) obligations through a one-stop scheme. The proposal was modest in scope. It was designed to build upon the success of a similar scheme that dealt with non-EU established persons supplying digital products to non-taxable EU persons. That scheme is found in Article 26c of the Sixth VAT Directive.

In its March Consultation Paper the Commission proposed that businesses established within the EU be allowed to participate in a one-stop scheme that would be similar to the Article 26c scheme. Limited to B2C transactions, …

Toward A More Expansive Welfare Devolution Debate, Steven Schwinn

Faculty Scholarship

Leading up to and in the wake of national welfare reform, commentators, scholars, and advocates debated one of the key ingredients in the 1996 legislation: devolution of responsibility for the design and administration of welfare from the federal government to the states. Pro-devolutionists argued that devolution would create 50 state welfare experiments, would result in welfare programs tailored to the unique needs of individual states, and would lead to a race to the top in the quality of welfare programs. Anti-devolutionists argued that devolution would encourage states to compete to repel welfare recipients, to avoid becoming welfare magnets, and, ultimately, …

Who's Afraid Of The Precautionary Principle?, Robert V. Percival

Faculty Scholarship

The precautionary principle – the notion that lack of scientific certainty should not foreclose precautionary regulation – has become enormously popular in recent years, as reflected by its endorsement in many important international declarations and agreements. Despite its growing influence, the precautionary principle recently has come under fire by critics who argue that it is incoherent, potentially paralyzing, and that it will lead regulators to make bad choices. They maintain that society faces greater peril from overly costly regulations than from exposure to sources of environmental risks whose effect on human health and the environment is not fully understood at …

The Peculiar Challenges Posed By Latent Diseases Resulting From Mass Products, Donald G. Gifford

Faculty Scholarship

Legal actions against manufacturers of products that cause latent diseases, such as asbestos products, cigarettes, lead-pigment, and Agent Orange, are the signature torts of our time. Yet within this rather important subset of tort liability, it is unlikely that the imposition of liability actually results in loss prevention. Three factors, present in varying combinations in the context of latent diseases resulting from product exposure, frustrate the deterrent impact of liability. First, an extended period of time—sometimes decades—passes between the time of the manufacturer’s distribution of the product and the imposition of liability. Second, the accident compensation system frequently is unable …

Defining Dicta, Maxwell L. Stearns, Michael Abramowicz

Faculty Scholarship

In recent decades, legal scholars have devoted substantially greater attention to studying the origin and nature of stare decisis than to defining the distinction between holding and dicta. This appears counterintuitive when one considers, first, that stare decisis applies only to holdings of announced precedents, and second, that beyond problematic and rudimentary intuitions, the legal system has failed to develop meaningful definitions of these terms. While lawyers, legal scholars, and jurists likely assume that they can identify dicta when they see it, a careful analysis that categorizes the range of judicial assertions in need of proper characterization reveals that defining …

Telling Stories, Saving Lives: The Battered Mothers' Testimony Project, Women's Narratives, And Court Reform, Leigh S. Goodmark

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Dorothy Day And Innovative Social Justice: A View From Inside The Box, Randy Lee

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Lessons To Be Learned, Lessons To Live Out: Catholicism At The Crossroads Of Judaism And American Legalism, Randy Lee

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Recognizing That They Watch, Mary Kate Kearney

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Targets, Timetables And Effective Implementing Mechanisms: Necessary Building Blocks For Sustainable Development, John C. Dernbach

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Worst Way Of Selecting Judges—Except All The Others That Have Been Tried, Michael R. Dimino

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Unconscionability As A Contract Policing Device For The Elder Client: How Useful Is It?, Robyn L Meadows

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Free Exercise And The Problem Of Symmetry, Nelson Tebbe

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Question Autonomy, With An Asterisk, Anita Bernstein

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Supreme Court Of Science Speaks On Water Rights: The National Academy Of Sciences Columbia River Report And Its Water Policy Implications, Reed D. Benson

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Benson reviews the Report on Columbia River water withdrawals and their effects on salmon recently issued by the National Academy of Sciences to the Washington State Department of Ecology, the agency responsible for managing Washingtons water withdrawals from the Columbia and its tributaries. After reviewing the Report, Professor Benson compares its recommendations with western water law's doctrine of prior appropriation and finds that many of the Report's recommendations are in direct conflict with prior appropriation principles. Finally, Professor Benson discusses the potential impact of the Report on water law in Washington and throughout the West. He concludes that, because …

Induced Autism The Legal And Ethical Implications Of Inoculating Vaccine Manufacturers From Liability, Helia Garrido Hull

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Practicing What We Teach: The Importance Of Emotion And Community Connection In Law Work And Law Teaching, Ann Juergens

Faculty Scholarship

Personal satisfaction and fine lawyering go hand in hand. Legal education and the legal system, however, do damage to that coupling. The author suggests that lawyers and law students can thwart personal dysfunction and professional dissatisfaction if we allow ourselves to express joy and sadness. To avoid being depleted by grief and rage, which cannot nourish satisfying law work over time, the article suggests that we attend to connections with others (all others). Lawyers who connect with their own communities may have more tools for crafting solutions for clients whose problems often implicate community. As teachers, the best way to …

Differentiating Types Of Domestic Violence: Implications For Child Custody, Nancy Ver Steegh

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines child custody determinations through the lens of a domestic violence typology. The resulting analysis (1) reconciles competing viewpoints and contradictory evidence about domestic violence; (2) matches families with appropriate child custody court procedures and services such as parent education, mediation, supervised visitation and parent coordination; and (3) exposes serious deficiencies in current domestic violence childcustody statutes.

A New Approach To Health Care Adr: Training Law Students To Be Problem Solvers In The Health Care Context, Linda H. Morton

Faculty Scholarship

This article focuses on the use of actual public health problems to train law students in interdisciplinary problem solving. The author describes the planning, structure, challenges and rewards in teaching her clinical course, Problem Solving and Prevention in Healthcare, to students initially reluctant to work collaboratively in teams, intimidated by a broader community context, and hesitant to interact strategically with other professionals.

Religious Lawyering Critique, The Aals Presentations, Bruce A. Green

Faculty Scholarship

One might think about the relationship between law practice and religion in different ways, depending on how one views either the professional norms or religious belief and observance. Some of the most recent academic literature on "religious lawyering" is premised on a highly critical view of the profession's norms and a claim that religious convictions that bear on the practice of law are incompatible with, and preferable to, aspects of the professional norms. My purpose here is to identify, and raise some questions about, both this critique and this suggestion, and to show how they are in tension with other …