Law Commons^™

Defining Health Affordability, Govind C. Persad

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Affordable health care, insurance, and prescription drugs are priorities for the public and for policymakers. Yet the lack of a consensus definition of health affordability is increasingly recognized as a roadblock to health reform efforts. This Article explains how and why American health law invokes health affordability and attempts, or fails, to define the concept. It then evaluates potential affordability definitions and proposes strategies for defining affordability more clearly and consistently in health law.

Part I examines the role health affordability plays in American health policy, in part by contrasting the United States’s health system with systems elsewhere. Part II …

Dobbs V. Jackson Women’S Health: Undermining Public Health, Facilitating Reproductive Coercion, Aziza Ahmed, Dabney P. Evans, Jason Jackson, Benjamin Mason Meier, Cecília Tomori

Faculty Scholarship

Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health continues a trajectory of U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence that undermines the normative foundation of public health — the idea that the state is obligated to provide a robust set of supports for healthcare services and the underlying social determinants of health. Dobbs furthers a longstanding ideology of individual responsibility in public health, neglecting collective responsibility for better health outcomes. Such an ideology on individual responsibility not only enables a shrinking of public health infrastructure for reproductive health, it facilitates the rise of reproductive coercion and a criminal legal response to pregnancy and abortion. This commentary …

Continuous Reproductive Surveillance, Michael Ulrich, Leah R. Fowler

Faculty Scholarship

The Dobbs opinion emphasizes that the state’s interest in the fetus extends to “all stages of development.” This essay briefly explores whether state legislators, agencies, and courts could use the “all stages of development” language to expand reproductive surveillance by using novel developments in consumer health technologies to augment those efforts.

(Re)Criminalizing Abortion: Returning To The Political With Stories, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

Abortion stories have always played a powerful role in advancing women’s rights. In the abortion sphere particularly, the personal is political. Following the Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, abortion politics, and abortion storytelling, take on an even deeper political role in challenging the bloodless judicial language of Dobbs with the lived experience of women.

Examining The New Standard Of Care For Medical Advice And Patients With Mental Health Conditions, Gary Kok Yew Chan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In 2017, the Singapore Court of Appeal in Hii Chii Kok v Oii Peng Jin London Lucien (Hii Chii Kok) favoured a patient-centric approach towards issues of providing medical advice. Section 37 of the Singapore Civil Law Act, which took effect on 1 July 2022, stipulates that the standard of care in giving medical advice to patients is based on peer professional opinion. This article will analyse, with reference to other common law jurisdictions, how the new statutory provision applies to patients with mental disorders under the Singapore Mental Capacity Act 2008. It will provide an interpretation of s 37 …

Meet Our New Faculty: Jenn Oliva, James Owsley Boyd

Keep Up With the Latest News from the Law School (blog)

Professor Jenn Oliva joined Indiana Law earlier this summer as a professor of law and as Val Nolan Faculty Fellow. Prior to joining the IU Maurer Law faculty, Professor Oliva served as Professor of Law and Co-Director of the UCSF/UC Law Consortium on Law, Science & Health Policy at the University of California College of Law, San Francisco. She has also served as Associate Dean for Faculty Research & Development and Director of the Center for Health & Pharmaceutical Law at Seton Hall University School of Law where she was selected as the law school’s 2021 Professor of the Year …

State Flexibility In Emergency Medicaid To Care For Uninsured Noncitizens, Jin K. Park, Clarisa Reyes-Becerra, Medha D. Makhlouf

Faculty Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Dying In Isolation: Public Health Implications Of Transportation And Burial Of Human Remains During A Pandemic A Fifty State Survey, Christopher Ogolla

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Shared Ethical Framework To Allocate Scarce Medical Resources: A Lesson From Covid-19, Ezekiel J. Emanuel, Govind C. Persad

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

The COVID-19 pandemic has helped to clarify the fair and equitable allocation of scarce medical resources, both within and among countries. The ethical allocation of such resources entails a three-step process: (1) elucidating the fundamental ethical values for allocation, (2) using these values to delineate priority tiers for scarce resources, and (3) implementing the prioritisation to faithfully realise the fundamental values. Myriad reports and assessments have elucidated five core substantive values for ethical allocation: maximising benefits and minimising harms, mitigating unfair disadvantage, equal moral concern, reciprocity, and instrumental value. These values are universal. None of the values are sufficient alone, …

Artificial Intelligence Tools In Clinical Neuroradiology: Essential Medico-Legal Aspects, Dennis M. Hedderich, Christian Weisstanner, Sofie Van Cauter, Christian Federau, Myriam Edjlali, Alexander Radbruch, Sara Gerke, Sven Haller

Faculty Scholarly Works

Commercial software based on artificial intelligence (AI) is entering clinical practice in neuroradiology. Consequently, medico-legal aspects of using Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) become increasingly important. These medico-legal issues warrant an interdisciplinary approach and may affect the way we work in daily practice. In this article, we seek to address three major topics: medical malpractice liability, regulation of AI-based medical devices, and privacy protection in shared medical imaging data, thereby focusing on the legal frameworks of the European Union and the USA. As many of the presented concepts are very complex and, in part, remain yet unsolved, this article …

Law Library Blog (March 2023): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Sanitation: Reducing The Administrative State’S Control Over Public Health, Lauren R. Roth

Scholarly Works

On April 18, 2022, in Health Freedom Defense Fund, Inc. v. Biden, United States District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle vacated the mask mandate issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Following a framework laid out in other decisions restricting CDC actions in response to COVID-19, the court found that the agency lacked statutory authority to protect the public from the virus by requiring mask wearing during travel and at transit hubs because Congress did not intend such a broad grant of power. Countering decades of public health jurisprudence, the federal district court failed to defer to experts and …

Menstruation In A Post-Dobbs World, Emily Gold Waldman, Bridget J. Crawford

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

In this Essay, we re-examine our 2022 book, Menstruation Matters: Challenging the Law's Silence on Periods, through multiple related lenses, including the human rights, sustainability, and workplace issues emphasized by our three reviewers; the COVID-19 pandemic; and the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. All of these perspectives converge on the inherent dignity and autonomy interests in being able to manage one's own body. Menstruation and related conditions like breastfeeding, pregnancy, and menopause should not be sources of shame or stigma. Nor should they be vectors of formal control by the government or de facto exclusion …

U.S. Law And Discrimination In Health Care, Kimani Paul-Emile

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Education And Electronic Medical Records And Genomics Network, Challenges And Lessons Learned From A Large-Scale Clinical Trial Using Polygenic Risk Scores, Ellen Wright Clayton, John J. Connolly, Et Al.

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Polygenic risk scores (PRS) have potential to improve health care by identifying individuals that have elevated risk for common complex conditions. Use of PRS in clinical practice, however, requires careful assessment of the needs and capabilities of patients, providers, and health care systems. The electronic Medical Records and Genomics (eMERGE) network is conducting a collaborative study which will return PRS to 25,000 pediatric and adult participants. All participants will receive a risk report, potentially classifying them as high risk (∼2-10% per condition) for 1 or more of 10 conditions based on PRS. The study population is enriched by participants from …

The Right To Personality: Navigating The Brave New World Of Personality-Altering Interventions, Christopher S. Sundby

Connecticut Law Review

As neuroscience progresses, policy makers will have an increasing arsenal of behavior-modifying interventions at their disposal to deploy in the hopes of reducing recidivism and making the criminal justice system more rehabilitative. While these interventions are promising, they also can pose grave risks to individual liberty interests that are insufficiently acknowledged, much less protected, by current jurisprudence. Specifically, the current legal regimes and proposed alternatives either fail to identify the nature of the liberty at stake by overly focusing on physical side effects to the exclusion of thought- and personality-altering side effects, reject completely the potential for these interventions to …

Legislated Ableism: Bill C-7 And The Rapid Expansion Of Medical Assistance In Dying In Canada, Isabel Grant

All Faculty Publications

This paper explores the recent expansion of medical assistance in dying to disabled people who are suffering intolerably but are not at the end of their lives. The paper argues that it is impossible to separate suffering caused by an irremediable disability and suffering caused by the impacts of systemic ableism, which include high rates of poverty, social isolation and exclusion for people with disabilities. The paper suggests that this expansion raises constitutional issues under s. 15 and s. 7 of the Charter because it is premised on a view that portrays disability as potentially worse than death and thus …

Hatch-Waxman’S Renegades, John R. Thomas

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

No intellectual property rights impact society more forcefully than patents on pharmaceuticals. But as a practical matter, only a handful of jurists resolve disputes involving them. Two neighboring federal districts, Delaware and New Jersey, adjudicate the vast majority of patent contests between brand-name drug companies and generic manufacturers. And in contrast to Eastern Texas, which has been persistently derided as a renegade jurisdiction, the authority of the mid-Atlantic courts has seldom been questioned. The complex workings of the Hatch-Waxman Act, the compromise legislation that governs pharmaceutical patent litigation, go a long way to explaining such distinct shareholder reactions to highly …

The Nih-Moderna Vaccine: Public Science, Private Profit, And Lessons For The Future, Christopher J. Morten

Faculty Scholarship

This commentary highlights the scientific history of the NIH-Moderna COVID-19 vaccine and corroborates Sarpatwari’s theme of private capture of value created by the public. The commentary also identifies missteps by the Trump and Biden Administrations and offers policy recommendations: better contracts with and incentives for pharmaceutical manufacturers and a not-for-profit “public option” for pharmaceutical development.