Law Commons^™

The International Response To Climate Change: An Agenda For Global Health, Lindsay F. Wiley, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

As the international community negotiates a successor to the Kyoto Protocol of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), there is new reason to hope that meaningful action might be taken to prevent devastating climate change. Even the more ambitious mitigation targets currently under negotiation, however, will not be sufficient to avoid a profound effect on the public's health in coming decades, with the world's poorest, most vulnerable populations bearing the disproportionate burden. The influence of historic and current emissions will be so substantial that it is imperative to reduce global emissions while at the same time preparing …

Healthy Planet, Healthy People: Integrating Global Health Into The International Response To Climate Change, Lindsay F. Wiley

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The potentially groundbreaking negotiations currently underway on the international response to climate change and national implementation of commitments under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) include a number of hotly contested issues: (1) what degree of climate change is acceptable as a basis for emissions targets, (2) to what extent and in what ways climate change mitigation should incorporate emissions reductions or increased sinks for developing countries, (3) whether the legal regime governing mitigation can take advantage of the huge mitigation potential of changed practices in the land use and agricultural sectors, (4) how adaptation should be …

Empirical Health Law Scholarship: The State Of The Field, Michelle M. Mello, Kathryn Zeiler

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The last three decades have seen the blossoming of the fields of health law and empirical legal studies and their intersection--empirical scholarship in health law and policy. Researchers in legal academia and other settings have conducted hundreds of studies using data to estimate the effects of health law on accident rates, health outcomes, health care utilization, and costs, as well as other outcome variables. Yet the emerging field of empirical health law faces significant challenges--practical, methodological, and political.

The purpose of this Article is to survey the current state of the field by describing commonly used methods, analyzing enabling and …

The Emergent Logic Of Health Law, Maxwell Gregg Bloche

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The American health care system is on a glide path toward ruin. Health spending has become the fiscal equivalent of global warming, and the number of uninsured Americans is approaching fifty million. Can law help to divert our country from this path? There are reasons for deep skepticism. Law governs the provision and financing of medical care in fragmented and incoherent fashion. Commentators from diverse perspectives bemoan this chaos, casting it as an obstacle to change. I contend in this Article that pessimism about health law’s prospects is unjustified, but that a new understanding of health law’s disarray is urgently …

Assessing Laws And Legal Authorities For Obesity Prevention And Control, Lawrence O. Gostin, Jennifer L. Pomeranz, Peter D. Jacobson, Richard N. Gottfried

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This is the first paper in a two part series on the laws and legal authorities for obesity prevention and control, which resulted from the National Summit on Legal Preparedness for Obesity Prevention and Control in 2008. In this paper, the authors apply the “laws and legal authorities” component of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) legal framework on public health legal preparedness to demonstrate the essential role that law can play in the fight against obesity. Their analysis identified numerous laws and policies in the three vital domains of healthy lifestyles, healthy places, and healthy societies. For …

Improving Laws And Legal Authorities For Obesity Prevention And Control, Lawrence O. Gostin, Jennifer L. Pomeranz

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This is the second paper in a two part series on the laws and legal authorities for obesity prevention and control. In this paper, the authors present the applicable laws and legal authorities that public health professionals and lawyers can consider implementing to close the legal gaps identified in the first paper (“Assessing Laws and Legal Authorities for Obesity Prevention and Control”). This set of legal action items encompass the federal, tribal, state, local, and community levels and should be considered when developing, implementing, and evaluating obesity prevention and control strategies and interventions.

The paper organizes the action items within …