Law Commons^™

Optimizing Cybersecurity Risk In Medical Cyber-Physical Devices, Christopher S. Yoo, Bethany Lee

All Faculty Scholarship

Medical devices are increasingly connected, both to cyber networks and to sensors collecting data from physical stimuli. These cyber-physical systems pose a new host of deadly security risks that traditional notions of cybersecurity struggle to take into account. Previously, we could predict how algorithms would function as they drew on defined inputs. But cyber-physical systems draw on unbounded inputs from the real world. Moreover, with wide networks of cyber-physical medical devices, a single cybersecurity breach could pose lethal dangers to masses of patients.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is tasked with regulating medical devices to ensure safety and …

Equal Protection In Dobbs And Beyond: How States Protect Life Inside And Outside Of The Abortion Context, Reva Siegel, Serena Mayeri, Melissa Murray

All Faculty Scholarship

In two paragraphs at the beginning of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court rejected the Equal Protection Clause as an alternative ground for the abortion right. As the parties had not asserted an equal protection claim on which the Court could rule, Justice Alito cited an amicus brief we co-authored demonstrating that Mississippi’s abortion ban violated the Equal Protection Clause, and, in dicta, stated that precedents foreclosed the brief’s arguments. Yet, Justice Alito did not address a single equal protection case or argument on which the brief relied. Instead, he cited Geduldig v. Aiello, a 1974 case …

Public Health Product Hops, Michael S. Sinha

All Faculty Scholarship

Pharmaceutical product hops are anticompetitive maneuvers that often represent a last-ditch effort by brand manufacturers to preserve market share in the face of generic competition. An integral part of product life cycle management strategies, product hops may offer marginal benefits to patients but can substantially increase costs to payers and patients alike. Yet industry advocates maintain that this is essential follow-on research and development, resulting in the development of novel products that would otherwise never reach the market.

Is there a middle ground between these two diametrically opposed views? Might certain product hops be considered beneficial, perhaps if they furthered …

Dobbs In A Technologized World: Implications For Us Data Privacy, Jheel Gosain, Jason D. Keune, Michael S. Sinha

All Faculty Scholarship

In June of 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning 50 years of precedent by eliminating the federal constitutional right to abortion care established by the Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. The Dobbs decision leaves the decision about abortion services in the hands of the states, which created an immediately variegated checkerboard of access to women’s healthcare across the country. This in turn laid bare a profusion of privacy issues that emanate from our technologized world. We review these privacy issues, including healthcare data, financial data, website tracking and …

The Psychology Of Science Denialism And Lessons For Public Health Authorities, Brenna Moreno, Molly J. Walker Wilson

All Faculty Scholarship

As it wreaked tragedy on the world, the outbreak of COVID-19 helped expose a pandemic of a different kind, one steeped in distrust and contrarianism. This movement, termed science denialism, has been lurking and undermining public health efforts for decades. Specifically, it is “the employment of rhetorical arguments to give the appearance of legitimate debate where there is none, an approach that has the ultimate goal of rejecting a proposition on which a scientific consensus exists.” Unlike skepticism, which is “doubt as to the truth of something” and works to progress both science and society, denialism is characterized by individuals’ …