Law Commons^™

Pandemic Surveillance Discrimination, Christian Sundquist

Articles

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the abiding tension between surveillance and privacy. Public health epidemiology has long utilized a variety of surveillance methods—such as contact tracing, quarantines, and mandatory reporting laws—to control the spread of disease during past epidemics and pandemics. Officials have typically justified the resulting intrusions on privacy as necessary for the greater public good by helping to stave off larger health crisis. The nature and scope of public health surveillance in the battle against COVID-19, however, has significantly changed with the advent of new technologies. Digital surveillance tools, often embedded in wearable technology, have greatly increased …

How Medicalization Of Civil Rights Could Disappoint, Allison K. Hoffman

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay reflects on Craig Konnoth’s recent Article, Medicalization and the New Civil Rights, which is a carefully crafted and thought-provoking description of the refashioning of civil rights claims into medical rights frameworks. He compellingly threads together many intellectual traditions—from antidiscrimination law to disability law to health law—to illustrate the pervasiveness of the phenomenon that he describes and why it might be productive as a tool to advance civil rights.

This response, however, offers several reasons why medicalization may not cure all that ails civil rights litigation’s pains and elaborates on the potential risks of overinvesting in medical rights-seeking. …

When Caring Is Work: Home, Health, And The Invisible Workforce: Introduction, Dianne Avery, Martha T. Mccluskey

Dianne Avery

This essay introduces the SUNY Buffalo Law School 2012 James McCormick Mitchell Lecture. The Lecture featured distinguished scholars Hendrik Hartog, Jennifer Klein, and Peggie R. Smith, who each contributed an essay to this volume. These three scholars give a richly detailed picture of home caretakers' struggles to gain visibility and support for their important work. Legal rulings and policy choices have made care workers distinctly vulnerable, treating care services as an expression of love rather than contract (as Hartog describes), or as social rehabilitation for marginal citizens rather than as skilled health care provision (as Klein explains), or as informal …

Pobreza Multidimensional En El Pacífico Colombiano 2010 - 2016, Lizeth Dayana Manzano Murillo, Laura Antonia Maturana Cifuentes

Economía

La pobreza es un fenómeno presente en muchos países de mundo, y un problema prioritario en las políticas de desarrollo económico y social, por lo que se hace pertinente estudiarla de manera rigurosa, analizando sus determinantes, y sus vínculos con los diferentes factores socioeconómicos de la población. Como bien se sabe, el Pacífico Colombiano es la región más pobre del país; cuenta con el menor ingreso per cápita, y elevadas tasas de pobreza monetaria y multidimensional. El objetivo de esta monografía de grado es analizar la pobreza en el Pacífico Colombiano, considerando la aproximación multidimensional, implementando de manera detallada la …

Why Baby Markets Aren’T Free, Dorothy E. Roberts

All Faculty Scholarship

Creating families in the twenty-first century increasingly happens in markets where the buying and selling of reproductive goods and services are facilitated by advanced technologies, the internet, contracts, and state laws and policies. Thus, the title of this international congress—“Baby Markets”—aptly captures a key aspect of modern reproduction. The ability of potential parents to engage in market transactions involving children enhances parents’ autonomy over their family lives. The free market seems to liberate us from the constraints of biology and state control.

This Essay argues, however, that baby markets aren’t free. Three aspects of the way reproductive goods and services …

Modernizing The Emergency Medical Treatment & Labor Act To Harmonize With The Affordable Care Act To Improve Equality, Quality And Cost Of Emergency Care, Katharine A. Van Tassel

Faculty Publications

The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) is a federal statute passed almost 30 years ago which was designed to ensure equal access to emergency treatment and to halt the practice of “patient dumping.” Patient dumping is a situation where some patients—typically uninsured, disabled, and minority individuals—receive inferior emergency medical care or are denied emergency medical treatment altogether. The goal of EMTALA is to ensure that everyone coming to the emergency room will receive equal care.

Unfortunately, despite EMTALA, the practice of patient dumping has continued to this day. The most recent case in the news is the …

Liberty, Equality, And Parentage In The Era Of Posthumous Conception, Jessica Knouse

Journal of Law and Health

This essay uses Astrue v. Capato as a platform to examine how liberty and equality interact within parent-child relationships. It observes that as prospective parents have experienced an increase in liberty due to new reproductive technologies the children they create have not necessarily experienced a commensurate increase in equality. The law’s myopic focus on parent-child relationships rather than provider-dependent relationships renders posthumously conceived children unequal along multiple dimensions. They may have not only one provider, but also only one parent. This essay argues that shifting the law’s focus away from identifying parents and towards identifying providers would mitigate the status …

Hiv, Violence Against Women, And Criminal Law Interventions, Aziza Ahmed

Faculty Scholarship

The growing calls for the “securitization of body and property,”[ii] documented by Jonathan Simon in his book Governing Through Crime, illustrates a deep tension in our understanding of the role of criminal law as a tool for societal transformation.[iii] For some, including communities of color, the criminal legal system is a place where inequality flourishes;[iv] for others, including those feminists who have support criminal law interventions, it has become a tool to realize equality.[v] The Trafficking Victims Protection Act, reauthorized in 2013 as an amendment to the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA),[vi] relies heavily on the criminal law to obtain …

Health Care, Title Vi, And Racism’S New Normal, Dayna B. Matthew

Dayna B Matthew

HEALTH CARE, TITLE VI, AND RACISM’S NEW NORMAL Dayna Bowen Matthew ABSTRACT An estimated 84,570 minority patients die annually due to health care disparities that result from the unconscious racism that pervades American health care. Over a decade ago, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) reviewed the egregious inequalities that black and brown patients suffer when they seek medical care for heart disease, diabetes, cancer, asthma, pain, strokes and virtually every disease, illness or malady. The IOM report identified physician stereotypes, bias, and prejudice as a possible reason for these disparities, but could not explain exactly why biases caused minority patients …

When Caring Is Work: Home, Health, And The Invisible Workforce: Introduction, Dianne Avery, Martha T. Mccluskey

Buffalo Law Review

This essay introduces the SUNY Buffalo Law School 2012 James McCormick Mitchell Lecture. The Lecture featured distinguished scholars Hendrik Hartog, Jennifer Klein, and Peggie R. Smith, who each contributed an essay to this volume. These three scholars give a richly detailed picture of home caretakers' struggles to gain visibility and support for their important work. Legal rulings and policy choices have made care workers distinctly vulnerable, treating care services as an expression of love rather than contract (as Hartog describes), or as social rehabilitation for marginal citizens rather than as skilled health care provision (as Klein explains), or as informal …

The Duty Of States To Assist Other States In Need: Ethics, Human Rights, And International Law, Lawrence O. Gostin, Robert Archer

O'Neill Institute Papers

This article deals with a foreign policy question of extraordinary importance: What responsibilities do States have to provide economic and technical assistance to other states that have high levels of need affecting the health and life of their citizens? The question is important for a variety of reasons. There exist massive inequalities in health globally, with the result that poorer countries shoulder a disproportionate burden of disease and premature death. While poor countries have by far the greatest ongoing health needs, they also have the least capacity to meet those needs. In addition to the pervasive and debilitating effects of …

Risk Equity: A New Proposal, Matthew D. Adler

All Faculty Scholarship

What does distributive justice require of risk regulators? Various executive orders enjoin health and safety regulators to take account of “distributive impacts,” “equity,” or “environmental justice,” and many scholars endorse these requirements. But concrete methodologies for evaluating the equity effects of risk regulation policies remain undeveloped. The contrast with cost-benefit analysis--now a very well developed set of techniques --is stark. Equity analysis by governmental agencies that regulate health and safety risks, at least in the United States, lacks rigor and structure. This Article proposes a rigorous framework for risk-equity analysis, which I term “probabilistic population profile analysis” (PPPA). PPPA is …

The Three Faces Of Retainer Care: Crafting A Tailored Regulatory Response, Frank Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

Retainer care arrangements allow patients to pay a fee directly to a physician's office in order to obtain special access to care. Practices usually convert to retainer status by concentrating their attention on a small panel and dropping the majority of their patients. Proponents call retainer care a triumph of consumer-directed health care; opponents deride it as boutique medicine. Both sides are deploying a variety of legal tactics in order to attain their goals.

After surveying these conflicts, this article clarifies what is at stake by analyzing the three key features of retainer care: preventive care, queue-jumping, and amenity-bundling. Most …

Introduction: Use Of Patients For Teaching Purposes Without Their Knowledge Or Consent, Michelle Oberman

Journal of Health Care Law and Policy

No abstract provided.

Unequal Access: The Crisis Of Health Care Inequality For Low-Income African-American Residents Of The District Of Columbia, Robyn Whipple Diaz

Journal of Health Care Law and Policy

No abstract provided.

The Impact Of The Purchaser Provider Funding Model Inthe U.K. On The Independence Of Persons With Disabilities:Implications For Canada, Sandra G. Leggat, Gaétan S. Tardif

Dalhousie Law Journal

Through large-scale system restructuring, a number of jurisdictions around the world have adopted a purchaserprovider approach to the funding and delivery of health care services. In this model, a decision-making body, such as a regional board, is provided with a budget to purchase health care services on behalf of, and in response to the identified needs of a defined population. This paper reviews the purchaser provider funding model of the United Kingdom and comments on the impact of this system on the health needs of individuals with disabilities. Generally, the purchaser provider split in the U.K. appears to have resulted …