Law Commons^™

Securing A Permanent Homeland: The Federal Government’S Responsibility To Provide Clean Water Access To Tribal Communities, Heather Tanana

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Water is life—critical to the health, socioeconomic, and cultural needs of any community. Every household in the United States needs and deserves access to clean, reliable, and a ordable drinking water. Yet, tribal communities face high rates of water insecurity. More than a half million people—nearly 48 percent of tribal homes in Native communities across the United States—do not have access to reliable water sources, clean drinking water, or basic sanitation. In comparison, as a whole, less than 1 percent of households in the United States lack these facilities. This persistent problem became a matter of life or death during …

Legal Terms Of Use And Public Genealogy Websites, Jorge L. Contreras, Kyle Schultz, Craig Teerlink, Tim Maness, Laurence Meyer, Lisa Cannon-Albright

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Public genealogy websites, to which individuals upload family history, genealogy, and sometimes individual genetic data, have been used in an increasing number of public health, epidemiological, and genetic studies. Yet there is little awareness among researchers of the legal rules that govern the use of these online resources. We analyzed the online Terms of Use (TOU) applicable to 17 popular genealogy websites and found that none of them expressly permit scientific research, while at least 13 contain restrictions that may limit or prohibit scientific research using data obtained from those sites. In order to ensure that researchers who use genealogy …

Expanding Access To Patents For Covid-19, Jorge L. Contreras

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Two competing and linked sets of goals must be addressed when considering patent policy in response to a public health emergency. First is the allocation of existing resources among potential users (hospitals, patients, etc.); second is the creation of new technologies over time (innovation). Patents provide financial incentives to develop new technologies. Yet shortages of patented products often plague crisis response. In the case of COVID-19, allocative goals, particularly satisfying demand for patented medical products (e.g., vaccines, ventilators, PPE, and test kits), may be achieved through governmental interventions such as march-in and governmental use rights (compulsory licensing). But in cases …

Upholding Tribal Sovereignty And Promoting Tribal Public Health Capacity During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Heather Tanana, Aila Hoss

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Tribes are sovereign nations with authorities and responsibilities over their land and people. This inherent sovereign authority includes the right to promote and protect the health and welfare of their communities. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought national attention to the health inequities experienced by American Indian and Alaska Native communities. The sovereign legal authority for Tribes to respond to this pandemic has received less attention. This Chapter describes some, but not all, of the urgent legal issues impacting Tribal response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It describes and identifies gaps in federal Indian health policies and highlights how Tribes have exercised …

Liability Rules For Health Information, Jorge L. Contreras, Francisca Nordfalk

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

The recent trend toward propertization of health data could pose significant challenges to biomedical research and public health. Property rule systems can result in sizable up-front costs in the acquisition of consent from individual data subjects, as well as the ongoing risk that data subjects will retract consent or object to unanticipated data uses, thus compromising existing data resources and analyses. We argue that property-based approaches to health data should be rejected in favor of liability rule frameworks for the protection of individual privacy interests. We demonstrate that liability rule frameworks for data governance are not only desirable from a …

Cholera And Climate Change: Pursuing Public Health Adaptation Strategies In The Face Of Scientific Debate, Robin Kundis Craig

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Climate change will affect the prevalence, distribution, and lethality of many diseases, from mosquito-borne diseases like malaria and dengue fever to directly infectious diseases like influenza to water-borne diseases like cholera and cryptosporidia. This Article focuses on one of the current scientific debates surrounding cholera and the implications of that debate for public health-related climate change adaptation strategies.

Since the 1970s, Rita Colwell and her co-researchers have been arguing a local reservoir hypothesis for cholera, emphasizing that river, estuarine, and coastal waters often contain more dormant forms of cholera attached to copepods, a form of zooplankton. Under this hypothesis, climatically …