Law Commons^™

Mandatory Hpv Vaccination And Political Debate, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Vaccinations are among the most cost-effective and widely used public health interventions, but have provoked popular resistance, with compulsion framed as an unwarranted state interference. When the FDA approved a human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine in 2006, conservative religious groups strongly opposed a mandate, arguing it would condone pre-marital sex, undermine parental rights, and violate bodily integrity. Yet, Governor Rick Perry signed an executive order in 2007 making Texas the first state to enact a mandate — later revoked by the legislature.

Mandatory HPV vaccination reached the heights of presidential politics in a recent Republican debate. Calling the vaccine a "very …

Improving The Population’S Health: The Affordable Care Act And The Importance Of Integration, Lorian E. Hardcastle, Katherine L. Record, Peter D. Jacobson, Lawrence O. Gostin

O'Neill Institute Papers

Heath care and public health are typically conceptualized as separate, albeit overlapping, systems. Health care’s goal is the improvement of individual patient outcomes through the provision of medical services. In contrast, public health is devoted to improving health outcomes in the population as a whole through health promotion and disease prevention. Health care services receive the bulk of funding and political support, while public health is chronically starved of resources. In order to reduce morbidity and mortality, policymakers must shift their attention to public health services and to the improved integration of health care and public health. In other words, …

Who’S Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Framework: A Milestone In Global Governance For Health, Lawrence O. Gostin, David P. Fidler

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In May 2008, the World Health Organization (WHO) adopted the Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Framework for the Sharing of Influenza Viruses and Access to Vaccines and Other Benefits (PIP Framework). The PIP Framework’s adoption ended years of difficult negotiations, which began after Indonesia refused to share samples of avian influenza A (H5N1) with WHO in late 2006. Indonesia justified its actions on the need to create more equitable access for developing countries to benefits, such as vaccines and antivirals, derived from research and development on shared influenza virus samples. The global health community feared that failure to share influenza virus samples …

Health Insurance Reform And Intimations Of Citizenship, Nan D. Hunter

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article considers the implications of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) for social meanings of civic belonging in American society and for possible new forms of individual engagement with the health care system. Once fully implemented, PPACA will have many of the governance characteristics of other social insurance systems, in that it will define membership in a collective undertaking, establish a mechanism for collective security against a shared risk, and channel, incentivize and penalize specific behaviors. The article considers the extent to which PPACA has the potential to also produce new narratives and understandings of social solidarity …

The Rise And Fall Of The Implied Warranty Of Habitability, David A. Super

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Growing concern about poverty in the late 1960s produced two sweeping legal revolutions. One gave welfare recipients rights against arbitrary eligibility rules and benefit terminations. The other gave low-income tenants recourse when landlords failed to repair their homes. The 1996 welfare law exposed the welfare rights revolution's frailty. Little noticed by legal scholars, the tenants' rights revolution also has failed, and for broadly similar reasons.

Withholding rent deliberately to challenge landlords' failure to repair is unduly risky for most tenants in ill-maintained dwellings: either moving to better housing is a better option or the risk of retaliation is too great. …

Risk Taking And Force Protection, David Luban

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This paper addresses two questions about the morality of warfare: (1) how much risk must soldiers take to minimize unintended civilian casualties caused by their own actions (“collateral damage”), and (2) whether it is the same for the enemy's civilians as for one's own.

The questions take on special importance in warfare where one side is able to attack the other side from a safe distance, but at the cost of civilian lives, while safeguarding civilians may require soldiers to take precautions that expose them to greater risk. In a well-known article, Asa Kasher and Amos Yadlin argue that while …

The Wider Context: The Future Of Capital Markets Regulation In Developed Markets, Cally Jordan

Faculty Papers & Publications

At a time of such great turbulence, looking to the future directions of capital markets and their regulation in developed economies is a particularly risky business. We are in the midst of a great sea change. Nevertheless, there are several current, and readily observable, phenomena which are likely to shape capital markets regulation in the near future. First of all, the blurring of the distinctions between developed and developing markets themselves, as well as that between domestic and international markets, has put into question the adequacy of existing regulatory frameworks. Also, the transatlantic dialogue, London – New York, has given …

Against Flexibility, David A. Super

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Contemporary legal thinking is in the thrall of a cult of flexibility. We obsess about avoiding decisions without all possible relevant information while ignoring the costs of postponing decisions until that information becomes available. We valorize procrastination and condemn investments of decisional resources in early decisions.

Both public and private law should be understood as a productive activity converting information, norms, and decisional and enforcement capacity into outputs of social value. Optimal timing depends on changes in these inputs’ scarcity and in the value of the decision they produce. Our legal culture tends to overestmate the value of information that …

Special Education, Poverty, And The Limits Of Private Enforcement, Eloise Pasachoff

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Article examines the appropriate balance between public and private enforcement of statutes seeking to distribute resources or social services to a socioeconomically diverse set of beneficiaries through a case study of the federal special education law, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). It focuses particularly on the extent to which the Act’s enforcement regime sufficiently enforces the law for the poor. The Article responds to the frequent contention that private enforcement of statutory regimes is necessary to compensate for the shortcomings of public enforcement. Public enforcement, the story goes, is inefficient and relies on underfunded, captured, or impotent …

The Tea Party, The Constitution, And The Repeal Amendment, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Given that the Tea Party is a right-of-center movement, it does not take an empiricist to know that most Tea Partiers hold right-of-center views on a variety of issues. This does not mean, however, that the Tea Party movement is about immigration policy or social issues like abortion, any more than the gun-rights movement is about any other beliefs that may be held by a majority of gun-rights advocates. Instead, the Tea Party movement is about two big subjects: first, the undeniable recent surge in national government spending and debt, and second, what Tea Partiers perceive as a federal government …