Law Commons^™

Reevaluating Regional Law Reform Strategies After Dobbs, Jamie Abrams

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This article studies the triad of 2016 social media campaigns known as “#AskDr.Kasich,” “#askbevinaboutmyvag,” and “#PeriodsforPence.” While these campaigns, each located in the regional mid-South, were motivated by restrictive state abortion bills, they uniquely positioned menstruation and women’s bodies at the center of their activism—not abortion alone. They leveraged, as a political fault line, the contradiction of these states’ governors’ perceived disgust relating to basic women’s reproductive health, relative to their patriarchal assuredness in regulating and controlling women’s bodies.

In so doing, they tapped into meaningful disruptions in the geographies, religiosities, and masculinities of abortion politics. These campaigns achieved regional …

Freedom Not To See A Doctor: The Path Toward Over-The-Counter Abortion Pills, Lewis Grossman

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American courts and lawmakers are engaged in an epic struggle over the fate of abortion pills. While some anti-abortion activists are attempting to drive the pills off the market entirely, supporters of reproductive rights are striving to make them more easily accessible. This Article advances the latter mission with a bold proposal: FDA should consider allowing abortion pills to be sold over the counter (OTC). Abortion rights supporters argue that FDA should repeal the special distribution and use restrictions it unnecessarily imposes on mifepristone, one of two drugs in the medication abortion regimen. Even if FDA removed these restrictions, however, …

The Ripple Effects Of Dobbs On Health Care Beyond Wanted Abortion, Maya Manian

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The Supreme Court’s momentous decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to overturn fifty years of precedent on the constitutional right to abortion represents a sea of change, not only in constitutional law, but also in the public health landscape. Although state laws on abortion are still evolving after Dobbs, the decision almost immediately wreaked havoc on the delivery of medical care for both patients seeking abortion care and those not actively seeking to terminate a pregnancy.

This Article also argues that focusing the public’s attention on the deleterious consequences of abortion bans for health care beyond wanted abortion …

Sunshine Laws Behind The Clouds: Limited Transparency In A Time Of National Emergency, Ira P. Robbins

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The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically changed the way citizens lived their lives, businesses operated, and governments functioned. With most people forced to stay home, the pandemic also disrupted how people received their news and other essential information. Public records and public meetings had to adapt to face the growing challenges in a locked-down world. While some governmental bodies were able to keep up with the threat that COVID-19 posed against transparency, others either failed to acclimate to the new normal or actively took advantage of the circumstances to limit how much the public knew not only about the crisis, but about …

Interjurisdictional Abortion Wars In The Post-Roe Era, Maya Manian

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The Supreme Court appears poised to overrule fifty years of precedent holding that pre-viability prohibitions on abortion are unconstitutional. In a leaked draft opinion of Dobbs v. Jackson Women Health Organization, Justice Alito proclaims that Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey must be overruled and abortion left to the states to regulate. During oral argument in Dobbs, Justice Kavanaugh suggested that overturning Roe would return the Court to a postion of "neutrality" on abortion. Justice Kavanaugh's assertion falls in line with claims by anti-abortion jurists that reversing Roe would simplify abortion law by returning the issue to the …

Epidemics And International Law: The Need For International Regulation, Claudio Grossman

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This article presents comments by the author made to open the Miami Law Review conference on Epidemics1 and International Law. Its main purpose is to refer to the impact of COVID-19 on different norms and legal regimes, focusing mainly on the 2005 International Health Regulations (IHR), addressing areas of reform as well as the interactions of those norms with international human rights law. This will include the proposals of change for the 2005 IHR, designed to better protect vulnerable peoples in future global health crises. Some of the ideas presented in this contribution are included in a proposal that I …

Quarantine, Isolation, And Metaphorical Takings: Balancing Individual Rights And Public Health Responses To Disease Outbreaks, Thomas Williams

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Quarantine and isolation are methods employed by public health officials to control the spread of dangerous disease pathogens through physical isolation of those exposed or symptomatic. While use of these methods has declined in the last century through advances in medical knowledge and treatment, emerging disease threats will likely require increased reliance on them. Despite this, quarantine statutes and related regulations fail to provide compensation to those subject to them, and little recourse exists to make those individuals whole for losses incurred, though the pandemic has highlighted a need for work in this area. One means of shifting the burden …

Introduction A Bold Agenda For The Next Steps In Health Reform, Lindsay Wiley

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Introduction: In the aftermath of the largely failed Clinton-era health reform push and the build-up to Obamaera reforms, experts worried that another failed effort could cast a ten-year shadow. The tenth anniversary of the Affordable Care Act offered an opportunity for participants in the 2019 Next Steps in Health Reform conference to reflect. If the ACA proves resilient, what paths will it have paved for the next decade of reforms?

Who's Afraid Of Section 1498? A Case For Government Patent Use In Pandemics And Other National Crisis, Charles Duan, Christopher J. Morten

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COVID-19 has created pressing and widespread needs for vaccines, medical treatments, PPE, and other medical technologies, needs that may conflict--indeed, have already begun to conflict--with the exclusive rights conferred by United States patents. The U.S. government has a legal mechanism to overcome this conflict: government use of patented technologies at the cost of government paid compensation under 28 U. S.C. § 1498. But while many have recognized the theoretical possibility of government patent use under that statute, there is today conventional wisdom that § 1498 is too exceptional, unpredictable, and dramatic for practical use, to the point that it ought …

Symposium: A Bold Agenda For The Next Steps In Health Reform: Introduction, Lindsay Wiley

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No abstract provided.

Coronavirus, Civil Libertities, And The Courts: The Case Against Suspending Judicial Review, Lindsay Wiley

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Introduction: For obvious reasons, local and state orders designed to help “flatten the curve” of novel coronavirus infections (and conserve health care capacity to treat coronavirus disease) have provoked a series of constitutional objections — and a growing number of lawsuits attempting to have those orders modified or overturned. Like the coronavirus crisis itself, much of that litigation remains ongoing as we write this Essay. But even in these early days, the emerging body of case law has rather elegantly teed up what we have previously described as “the central (and long-running) normative debate over emergency powers: Should constitutional constraints …

Acting Differently: How Science On The Social Brain Can Inform Antidiscrimination Law, Susan Carle

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Legal scholars are becoming increasingly interested in how the literature on implicit bias helps explain illegal discrimination. However, these scholars have not yet mined all of the insights that science on the social brain can offer antidiscrimination law. That science, which researchers refer to as social neuroscience, involves a broadly interdisciplinary approach anchored in experimental natural science methodologies. Social neuroscience shows that the brain tends to evaluate others by distinguishing between "us" versus "them" on the basis of often insignificant characteristics, such as how people dress, sing, joke, or otherwise behave. Subtle behavioral markers signal social identity and group membership, …

Right To A Healthy Prison Environment: Health Care In Custody Under The Prism Of Torture, Juan E. Mendez

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No abstract provided.

Manufactured Emergencies, Robert Tsai

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Emergencies are presumed to be unusual affairs, but the United States has been in one state of emergency or another for the last forty years. That is a problem. The erosion of democratic norms has led to not simply the collapse of the traditional conceptual boundary between ordinary rule and emergency governance, but also the emergence of an even graver problem: the manufactured crisis. In an age characterized by extreme partisanship, institutional gridlock, and technological manipulation of information, it has become exceedingly easy and far more tempting for a President to invoke extraordinary power by ginning up exigencies. To reduce …

Using The Ada's 'Integration Mandate' To Disrupt Mass Incarceration, Robert Dinerstein

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As a result of the disability rights movement's fight for the development of community-based services, the percentage of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD) and mental illness living in institutions has significantly decreased over the last few decades. However, in part because of government failure to invest properly in community-based services required for a successful transition from institutions, individuals with disabilities are now dramatically overrepresented in jails and prisons. The Americans with Disabilities Act's (ADA) "integration mandate" -- a principle strengthened by the Supreme Court's 1999 Olmstead v. L.C. decision, entitling individuals with disabilities to receive services in the …

Medicaid For All?: State-Level Single-Payer Health Care, Lindsay Wiley

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If single-payer health care is ever to become a reality in the United States, it will very likely be pioneered by a state government, much like Canada’s single-payer system was first adopted in the provinces. Canada’s system operates more like U.S. Medicaid — financed nationally but administered largely by the provinces — than U.S. Medicare. This article describes three basic strategies progressive U.S. state governments are exploring for achieving universal access to high-quality health care and better health outcomes for their residents. First, maximizing eligibility for the existing Medicaid program using matching federal funds. Second, taking up the mantle of …

Take Time To Wander Outside Your Comfort Zone, David Spratt

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No abstract provided.

The Polarization Of Reproductive And Parental Decision-Making, Jamie Abrams

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Women’s abortion decision-making and parental decision-making in child rearing are constructed as polarized methods of decision-making. Women’s abortion decision-making is understood as myopic and individualistic. Parental decision-making is understood as sacrificial and selfless. This polarization leaves reproductive decision-making isolated, marginalized, and vulnerable while parental decision-making is essentialized, protected, and revered. Both framings are inaccurate and problematic. A unified family decision-making framework that aligns abortion decision-making and parental decision-making reveals that both forms of decision-making are more multi-dimensional, relational, and family-centered than currently understood. This article exposes the ground to be gained by crossing longstanding boundaries in family law and reproductive …

Teaching Health Law From A Social-Ecological Perspective, Lindsay Wiley

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I started teaching health law relatively recently-in the fall of 2010, just after the Affordable Care Act ("ACA") was enacted, but before much of it had been implemented. This timing has been a blessing because I started with a fresh slate rather than adding the ACA on top of a previously developed course. It has also been a curse, but ultimately I appreciate that I started teaching the course at a time when the ACA was under constant threat. The ever-evolving nature of health law means that health law teachers must always bear in mind a goal that applies to …

Privatizing Bars On Abortion: Eviscerating Constitutional Rights Through Tort Remedies, Maya Manian

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State governments have devised a new means to evade the Constitution. Their new means is to enact tort statutes that, in effect, ban constitutionally protected conduct. In particular, some states have made the provision of an abortion a tort for which there can be no defense and no cap on the amount of liability. These states have made performing an abortion essentially illegal. Yet, because tort statutes are enforced through private litigation, rather than public prosecution, a number of courts have held that they lack jurisdiction to review these laws. Federal courts have concluded that standing doctrine and state sovereign …

Teenage Pregnancy, Parenting, And Abortion: Legal Limits On Adolescents' Reproductive Rights, Maya Manian

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As numerous scholars have noted, the law takes a strikingly incoherent approach to adolescent reproduction. States overwhelmingly allow a teenage girl to independently consent to pregnancy care and medical treatment for her child, and even to give up her child for adoption, all without notice to her parents, but require parental notice or consent for abortion. This chapter argues that this oft-noted contradiction in the law on teenage reproductive decision-making is in fact not as contradictory as it first appears. A closer look at the law's apparently conflicting approaches to teenage abortion and teenage childbirth exposes common ground that scholars …

Tobacco, Denormalization, Anti-Healthism, And Health Justice, Lindsay Wiley

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No abstract provided.

Side Effects Of The Abortion Wars, Maya Manian

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Over the last several decades, as part of the movement against abortion rights, abortion has become increasingly stigmatized and isolated in women's health. The current segregation of abortion from the rest of women's medical needs brings us full circle back to questions raised by Roe v. Wade. Although Roe was rightly criticized as over-medicalizing the abortion decision and empowering doctors rather than women, we have now shifted to the opposite extreme of severing abortion completely from the realm of women's health. While it remains important to understand abortion access as necessary to sustaining women's right to equal citizenship, the public's …

Liability For Mobile Health And Wearable Technologies, Lindsay Wiley, Nicolas Terry

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Most of the legal commentary regarding mobile health has focused on direct regulation leveraging existing laws and regulators such as HIPAA privacy through HHS-OCR or device regulation by the FDA. However, much of the mobile health revolution likely will play out in lightly regulated spaces bereft of most of the privacy, security, and safety rules associated with traditional health care. This article examines the potential for common law liability models to bridge these gaps (even on a temporary basis). Part II of this paper provides an introduction to the terminology used, and presents a brief typology of the apps appearing …

Applying The Health Justice Framework To Diabetes As A Community-Managed Social Phenomenon, Lindsay Wiley

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INTRODUCTION: In East Harlem, it is possible to take any simple nexus of people -the line at an A.T.M., a portion of a postal route, the members of a church choir -and trace an invisible web of diabetes that stretches through the group and out into the neighborhood, touching nearly every life with its menace.Ten years ago, the New York Times published "Bad Blood," a series of articles examining the impact of diabetes on the residents of New York City. In the years that followed, New York pioneered a series of groundbreaking legal interventions, including implementing measures to track diabetes …

From Patient Rights To Health Justice, Lindsay Wiley

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Models emphasizing professional autonomy, patient rights, market power, and health consumerism are no longer adequate to address the increasingly social, collective nature of health law institutions, instruments, and norms. What is needed is a new model that expressly recognizes the public-alongside the patient, the provider, and the payer-as an important stakeholder and active participant in decisions about medical treatment, health care coverage, and allocation of scarce resources. In a previous article, the author looked to the environmental justice, reproductive justice, and food justice movements for inspiration in developing a "health justice" approach to eliminating social disparities in health. This Article …

Minors, Parents, And Minor Parents, Maya Manian

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

As numerous scholars have noted, the law takes a strikingly incoherent approach to adolescent reproduction. States overwhelmingly allow a teenage girl to independently consent to pregnancy care and medical treatment for her child, and even to give up her child for adoption, all without notice to her parents, but require parental notice or consent for abortion. This Article argues that this oft-noted contradiction in the law on teenage reproductive decision-making is in fact not as contradictory as it first appears. A closer look at the law’s apparently conflicting approaches to teenage abortion and teenage childbirth exposes common ground that scholars …

The Affordable Care Act Is Not Tort Reform, Andrew F. Popper

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On March 23, 2010, President Obama signed The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). Prior to the enactment of the PPACA, Congress held several hearings focused on subrogation and relaxation of collateral source restrictions as well as caps on damages in an effort to promote tort reform. While the ACA included provisions on medical liability reform, the suggested tort reform was thwarted, and the ACA had no actual legal effect on limiting medical malpractice liability. This article argues that the reality is that the PPACA has done nothing to change the admissibility of collateral sources nor has it enhanced …

Griswold, Geduldig, And Hobby Lobby: The Sex Gap Continues, Maya Manian

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In her article, The (Non)-Right to Sex, Professor Mary Ziegler excavates the fascinating legal history of the “sex gap” — the historical failure to address sexual liberty — in the constitutional canon and offers an important cautionary tale for contemporary advocacy of marriage equality. By surfacing lost efforts to expand sexual liberty, and by linking that liberty to intersectional concerns about class, gender, and racial equality, Professor Ziegler both explains why sexual freedom has received such limited constitutional protection and shows how incrementalist litigation strategies aimed at progressive legal change have inadvertently strengthened the state’s power to delimit sexual expression. …

Adventures In Nannydom: Reclaiming Collective Action For The Public's Health, Lindsay Wiley, Wendy E. Parmet, Peter D. Jacobson

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This article presents a summary of recent collaborative efforts to understand and respond to nanny state rhetoric. Instead of summarily rejecting the libertarian critique of paternalism, public health advocates must develop a forceful response that exposes its weak legal basis and reframes the debate in terms of democratic collective action.