Law Commons^™

To Our Children's Children's Children: The Problems Of Intergenerational Ethics, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay serves as the introduction to the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review's symposium on intergenerational justice. The importance of this topic cannot be overstated. Intergenerational ethics bears on questions of environmental policy, health policy, intellectual property law, international development policy, social security policy, telecommunications policy, and a variety of other issues.

Part II, Clarifying the Problems of Intergenerational Ethics, is a first sketch of the scope and nature of intergenerational justice, introducing a variety of cases and contexts in which issues of intergenerational ethics arise and distinguishing between the political and moral dimensions of these issues. Part …

The Market For Medical Ethics, Maxwell Gregg Bloche

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

At the core of Kenneth Arrow’s classic 1963 essay on medical uncertainty is a claim that has failed to carry the day among economists. This claim—that physician adherence to an anti-competitive ethic of fidelity to patients and suppression of pecuniary influences on clinical judgment pushes medical markets toward social optimality—has won Arrow near-iconic status among medical ethicists (and many physicians). Yet conventional wisdom among health economists, including several participants in this symposium, holds that this claim is either naïve or outdated. Health economists admire Arrow’s article for its path-breaking analysis of market failures resulting from information asymmetry, uncertainty, and moral …

W(H)Ither Zschernig?, Carlos Manuel Vázquez

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The author argues here that a declaration of victory by the critics of the dormant foreign affairs doctrine would be premature. Notwithstanding the Court's citation of Ashwander v. TVA, the actual grounds of the decision in Crosby were in no meaningful sense less "constitutional" in nature than a decision based on the dormant foreign affairs power would have been. Moreover, even though the Court said that its decision was based on a straightforward application of "settled ... implied preemption doctrine," the Court's preemption analysis was anything but ordinary. Indeed, Crosby's version of preemption analysis is subject to the …

Race And Discretion In American Medicine, Maxwell Gregg Bloche

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The author’s focus in this article is on racial disparities in medical care provision--that is, on differences in the services that clinically similar patients receive when they present to the health care system. Racial disparities in health status, which is not greatly influenced (on a population-wide basis) by medical care, are beyond his scope here. Disparities in medical care access-potential patients' ability, financial and otherwise, to gain entry to the health care system in the first place, are also outside his focus. The author begins this article by putting the problem of racial disparities in medical care provision within the …

Privacy And Power, Rosa Brooks

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Something has gone wrong in modem America, argues Jeffrey Rosen in The Unwanted Gaze. Our medical records are bought and sold by health care providers, drug companies, and the insurance industry. Our e-mails are intercepted and read by our employers. Amazon.com knows everything there is to know about our reading and web-browsing habits. Poor Monica Lewinsky's draft love letters to President Bill Clinton were seized by the villainous Ken Starr, and ultimately plastered all over the nation's newspapers.

To Rosen, the nature of the problem is clear: These examples are all part of a troubling "phenomenon that affects all …

Out Of The Ordinary: Law, Power, Culture, And The Commonplace, Naomi Mezey

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Review of The Common Place of Law: Stories From Everyday Life by Patricia Ewick & Susan S. Silbey (1998).

Sometimes a work's intellectual influences reveal both its strengths and its shortcomings. This is certainly the case with Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey's The Common Place of Law: Stories From Everyday Life, and its indebtedness to the thinking of Michel Foucault and Michel de Certeau. Taken together, Foucault and de Certeau's work suggests that investigations of law's power are most fruitful not at the level of legal institutions and the state but at the level of lived experience, where we …