Law Commons^™

Law, Criminalisation And Hiv In The World: Have Countries That Criminalise Achieved More Or Less Successful Pandemic Response?, Matthew M. Kavanagh, Schadrac C. Agbla, Marissa Joy, Kashish Aneja, Mara Pillinger, Alaina Case, Ngozi A. Erondu, Taavi Erkkola, Ellie Graeden

O'Neill Institute Papers

How do choices in criminal law and rights protections affect disease-fighting efforts? This long-standing question facing governments around the world is acute in the context of pandemics like HIV and COVID-19. The Global AIDS Strategy of the last 5 years sought to prevent mortality and HIV transmission in part through ensuring people living with HIV (PLHIV) knew their HIV status and could suppress the HIV virus through antiretroviral treatment. This article presents a cross-national ecological analysis of the relative success of national AIDS responses under this strategy, where laws were characterised by more or less criminalisation and with varying rights …

From Nucleotides To Nuanced Law: The Value Of An Incremental Approach To Experimentation In State-Level Genetic Anti-Discrimination Legislation, Katelyn Fisher

University of Massachusetts Law Review

A person’s genetic information tells a detailed story of what someone looks like, who her relatives are, and even what illnesses she may develop. This information, as enlightening as it may be, can be especially damaging when utilized in a discriminatory way. This Note explores how the protections under the Genetic Non Discrimination Act of 2008 will no longer be sufficient for protecting individuals from genetic discrimination as the use of genetic information becomes more commonplace. The questions become: Where do we start? How and where should protections that extend to circumstances not covered by GINA be created in a …

The Future Of The Americans With Disabilities Act: Website Accessibility Litigation After Covid-19, Randy Pavlicko

Cleveland State Law Review

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was enacted in 1990 to eliminate discrimination against individuals with disabilities. Over time, as society has become more reliant on the internet, the issue of whether the ADA’s scope extends beyond physical places to online technology has emerged. A circuit split developed on this issue, and courts have discussed three interpretations of the ADA’s scope: (1) the ADA applies to physical places only; (2) the ADA applies to a website or mobile app that has a sufficient nexus to a physical place; or (3) the ADA broadly applies beyond physical places to online technology. …

Unexpected Inequality: Disparate-Impact From Artificial Intelligence In Healthcare Decisions, Sahar Takshi

Journal of Law and Health

Systemic discrimination in healthcare plagues marginalized groups. Physicians incorrectly view people of color as having high pain tolerance, leading to undertreatment. Women with disabilities are often undiagnosed because their symptoms are dismissed. Low-income patients have less access to appropriate treatment. These patterns, and others, reflect long-standing disparities that have become engrained in U.S. health systems.

As the healthcare industry adopts artificial intelligence and algorithminformed (AI) tools, it is vital that regulators address healthcare discrimination. AI tools are increasingly used to make both clinical and administrative decisions by hospitals, physicians, and insurers—yet there is no framework that specifically places nondiscrimination obligations …

Weathering The Pandemic: Dying Old At A Young Age From Pre-Existing Racist Conditions, Arline T. Geronimus

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

Mainstream social epidemiology now acknowledges the contributions of interpersonal racism, racialized stress, and implicit bias to population health inequity. It also increasingly recognizes that current and historical racist policies place barriers in the way of healthy lifestyles by institutionalizing food deserts, housing decay, and austerity urbanism. Essential as these developments are, they only skim the surface of how insidiously structural racism establishes and reproduces population health inequity. I coined the term “weathering” to describe the effects of sustained cultural oppression upon the body. Weathering expands on the more conventional “social determinants of health” approach to understand the contextually fluctuating and …

Empathy’S Promise And Limits For Those Disproportionately Harmed By The Covid-19 Pandemic, Theresa Glennon

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

Structural race, ethnicity, and class disparities in the United States concentrated and intensified the health, economic, and psychological impact of COVID-19 for certain populations. Those same structural disparities and the belief system that maintains them may also account for the weak policy response that left the United States with high rates of infection and death, economic devastation of individuals, families, and small businesses, and psychological distress. A more equal society with a stronger pre-pandemic safety net may have prevented or eased the disproportionate hardship and avoided the drama and cliffhanging. Or the shock of a pandemic and likelihood of extreme …

Rationing In The Time Of Covid And The Perils Of Anti-Subordination Rhetoric, Mark Kelman

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

With surges in COVID-19 cases threatening to overload some hospital facilities, we must face the possibility that therapeutic treatments will need to be rationed, at least in some places. I do not propose any particular ideal rationing scheme but caution strongly against adopting a position that Professor Bagenstos advocated this past spring, rejecting rationing on the basis of patient life expectancy simply because life expectancy based rationing might threaten the factual interests of those with disabilities and might conceivably be implemented by those making judgments that were not simply inaccurate but grounded in biased, unacceptably discriminatory intuitions that some decision …

1 Step Forward 2 Steps Back: The Transgender Individual Right To Access Optimal Health Care, Alexandre Rotondo-Medina

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

No abstract provided.

Becoming Visible, Jennifer B. Shinall

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Article will consider the consequences of a large number of workers making their health conditions known to their employers during the pandemic. Becoming visible will likely have short-term costs for both employers and employees-—in terms of health-status discrimination, privacy, and administrative burdens. Nonetheless, this Article will ultimately argue that becoming visible also has a major benefit: improved information flow between employers and employees. Although the long-run cost-benefit analysis of increased health-status visibility during the pandemic remains to be seen, increased visibility ultimately has the potential to improve the employer-employee relationship.