Health Law and Policy Commons^™

El Borrado Del Sexo: La Captura Global De Las Políticas Sobre Sexo Por Parte De Los Activistas De La Identidad De Género Y Los Efectos Sobre Los Derechos De Las Mujeres Y Las Niñas, Feministas De Europa, Asia, América Del Norte, América Latina Y África, Analía Susana Vitale Rosenbrock

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

Este artículo revisa los objetivos, la historia y el impacto de las nuevas políticas de identidad de género. Basadas en los Principios de Yogyakarta, estas nuevas ideas y políticas afectarán profundamente los derechos de las mujeres y las niñas en todo el mundo. Los Principios son un documento de una reunión internacional sobre orientación sexual e identidad de género en 2006. En 2017, el documento se actualizó a los Principios de Yogyakarta Plus 10. Los Principios recomiendan cambios legales por parte de los estados en todo el mundo, lo que resulta en la eliminación del sexo como una …

Eliminating Cash Bail In Washington State—Amending Criminal Rule 3.2, Simran Kaur

Seattle University Law Review

This Note discusses the following three parts. Part I provides an overview of the cash bail system, its history, and its contemporary use in Washington state. Part II presents the effects of bail on pretrial release, analyzing low-income and racial inequalities and the adverse impacts it can have on the accused. Part III focuses on solutions and alternatives to the cash bail system, using other states as case studies.

Promoting Corporate Diversity: The Uncertain Role Of Institutional Investors, Jill Fisch

Seattle University Law Review

Two developments are having an impact on corporate decisions. One is the increased engagement by institutional intermediaries and a shift in the focus of that engagement from corporate governance to environmental and social issues. The other is a heightened societal awareness of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) issues, particularly the importance of diversity in corporate leadership. This Article considers the intersection between the two. It describes how institutional investors have focused their attention on increasing diversity in corporate leadership, the potential motivations for that focus, and the impact of that focus, to date. It highlights the tensions that result from …

America’S Hidden Citizens: The Untold Stories Of The Unconscionable Deportations Of Its International Adoptees, Halley Cody

Seattle University Law Review

This Note addresses how the U.S. should rectify the harms it has perpetrated on non-citizen adoptees by amending the current deportation statutes to prevent their deportation. Part I addresses the history of adoption in the U.S. and related effects on immigration law. Part II highlights the stories of Adam Crapser and Philip Clay, who were adopted by American families who failed to naturalize them as minors, and who were subsequently deported after they sustained criminal records. Part III examines the policy goals behind deportation as a consequence of criminal convictions, as well as remedies instituted to prevent unwarranted deportation and …

Inadequate Privacy: The Necessity Of Hipaa Reform In A Post-Dobbs World, Katherine Robertson

Seattle University Law Review

Part I of this Comment will provide an overview of HIPAA and the legal impacts of Dobbs. Part II will discuss the anticipatory response to the impacts of Dobbs on PHI by addressing the response from (1) the states, (2) the Biden Administration, and (3) the medical field. Part III will discuss the loopholes that exist in HIPAA and further address the potential impacts on individuals and the medical field if reform does not occur. Finally, Part IV will argue that the reform of HIPAA is the best avenue for protecting PHI related to reproductive healthcare.

Universal Forms Of Influence: Support For Women On Boards, Cindy A. Schipani, Paula J. Caproni

Seattle University Law Review

There are various efforts underway to increase gender diversity on corporate boards, including legislation in California, a recent SEC approved comply or explain rule for companies listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange, and efforts by institutional investors such as State Street and BlackRock to recognize the value diversity brings to corporate decisionmaking. Although some of these efforts are being contested in the courts, many companies have begun to comply with these initiatives.

This Article is organized as follows. Part I provides an overview of several efforts to increase gender diversity on boards along with numerous research studies showcasing the benefits …

“Statistics Are Human Beings With The Tears Wiped Away”: Utilizing Data To Develop Strategies To Reduce The Number Of Native Americans Who Go Missing, Lori Mcpherson, Sarah Blazucki

Seattle University Law Review

On New Year’s Eve night, 2019, sixteen-year-old Selena Shelley Faye Not Afraid attended a party in Billings, Montana, about fifty miles west of her home in Hardin, Montana, near the Crow Reservation. A junior at the local high school, she was active in her community. The party carried over until the next day, and she caught a ride back toward home with friends in a van the following afternoon. When the van stopped at an interstate rest stop, Selena got out but never made it back to the van. The friends reported her missing to the police and indicated they …

Nestlé V. Doe: A Death Knell To Corporate Human Rights Accountability?, Phillip Ayers

Seattle University Law Review

The Supreme Court in Nestlé v. Doe held that foreign plaintiffs who claimed to be victims of overseas tortious conduct by corporate defendants had no jurisdiction to sue in federal courts using the Alien Tort Statute. This Comment looks at the history of the Alien Tort Statute, from its inspiration, long dormancy, and recent reinvigoration beginning in the 1980s. The Comment then explores the background of Nestlé and its issues with child slavery in its cocoa supply chain. From there, the Comment analyzes the Nestlé v. Doe decision, and posits an alternative outcome. Finally, this Comment looks for a new …

The Expected Risks And Exacerbations Of Poverty, Mental Health Disorders, And Maternal Mortality From Abortion Bans: A Comparative Literature Analysis, Daniel J. Francisco

All Master's Theses

Background. Early termination of a pregnancy (hereinafter referred to as an “abortion”) has been debated in the United States (U.S.) for decades, without much regard to the negative outcomes that forced pregnancies have for those assigned female at birth regarding poverty, mental health and maternal mortality. In 1973, access to safe abortions was protected so long that the procedure was done within the legal gestational period and/or was necessary for the health and safety of the patient (Blackmun, 1972). Unfortunately, in 2022, the Supreme Court took that protection away and made it legal for states to determine the reproductive rights …

Gender Confirmation Surgery And The Federal Prison System: Eighth Amendment Framework And Proposed Alternatives, Julie Barnett

Marquette Benefits and Social Welfare Law Review

As reform for individuals with gender dysphoria has developed, the prison system's accommodation of those individuals' needs has underperformed. There have been a number of cases in the past few years where inmates who are experiencing gender dysphoria have not received adequate care in the form of gender confirmation surgery. Four of the Federal Appellate Circuit Courts have decided that a physician's refusal to provide an inmate with gender confirmation surgery is not a violation of the 8th Amendment. One circuit ruled differently and held that denial of the surgery to an inmate experiencing gender dysphoria does violate the 8th …

The Impact Of Post-Dobbs Abortion Bans On Prenatal Tort Claims, Aviva K. Diamond

Michigan Law Review

In June 2022, the Supreme Court revoked Americans’ fundamental right to abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. However, the Court said nothing about how its decision would impact tort claims related to reproductive care. Many states have since adopted near-total or early-gestational- age abortion bans, which has not only diminished access to reproductive care, but has also incidentally impaired the ability of plaintiffs to bring long-recognized prenatal tort claims. Prenatal tort claims—wrongful pregnancy, birth, and life—allow victims to recover when a medical professional negligently performs reproductive or prenatal care. This Note identifies the impact that post-Dobbs …

Corporate Governance And Gender Equality: A Study Of Comply-Or-Explain Disclosure Regulation, Aaron A. Dhir, Sarah Kaplan, Maria Arabella Robles

Seattle University Law Review

In 2020, the Nasdaq Stock Market filed a proposal with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission seeking permission to adopt a board diversity-related disclosure requirement for its listed companies. In 2021, the SEC approved the proposal, thus entrenching Nasdaq’s position as the most significant stock exchange to date to mandate listing rules that reflect the intention of diversifying corporate boardrooms. Nasdaq’s movement into the diversity space is not the first attempt to address homogeneous boards in the U.S. In 2009, the SEC adopted a rule requiring publicly traded firms to report on whether they consider diversity in identifying director nominees. …

Judicial Ethics And The Eradication Of Racism, Dontay Proctor-Mills

Seattle University Law Review

In 2020, the Washington Supreme Court entrusted the legal community with working to eradicate racism from its legal system. Soon after, Washington’s Commission on Judicial Conduct (hereinafter the Commission) received a complaint about a bus ad for North Seattle College featuring King County Superior Court Judge David Keenan. Along with a photo of Judge Keenan’s face, the ad included the following language: “A Superior Court Judge, David Keenan got into law in part to advocate for marginalized communities. David’s changing the world. He started at North.” The Commission admonished Judge Keenan for violating the Code of Judicial Conduct, in part …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Why Corporate Boards Should Include Lgbtq+ People, Jeremy Mcclane, Darren Rosenblum

Seattle University Law Review

Corporate boardrooms sit at the heart of most of society’s most consequential decisions but fall far short of the diversity of our society. The current movement toward board diversification aims to remedy the underrepresentation of marginalized groups on corporate boards. More recently, some efforts have included LGBTQ+ people, even though the basis for their inclusion on corporate boards remains largely unstated. This Article examines both the normative and instrumental bases for LGBTQ+ inclusion in board diversity initiatives, articulating unspoken assumptions and linking LGBTQ+ people to the broader inclusion effort. In so doing, it begins to surface the unique issues LGBTQ+ …

“Made To Feel Broken”: Ending Conversion Practices And Saving Transgender Lives, Jennifer Levi, Kevin M. Barry

Faculty Scholarship

There has been a recent unprecedented, coordinated campaign by state governments to deny gender-transition care to transgender youth. It is within this context that Florence Ashley argues in Banning Transgender Conversion Practices: A Legal and Policy Analysis that legislation banning conversion practices is both lifesaving to transgender people directly affected and an important step in securing health and the recognition of dignity for all transgender people. The Authors highly recommend the book as a thoughtful and well-researched look at the issue. They also expand on several topics discussed in the book, including the harm caused by these practices, the constitutionality …

Alito Versus Roe V. Wade: Dobbs As A Means Of Circumvention, Avoidance, Attenuation And Betrayal Of The Constitution, Antony Hilton

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

There can be no argument that Justice Alito is a learned justice of great knowledge and reason, and has a superb grasp of the law. As such, despite any opposition to or disagreement with his legal opinions, he is deserving of respect for his intellectual prowess, in general and as it relates to the Constitution. Notwithstanding all the aforementioned, wrong is wrong.

In Defense Of The Juggernaut: The Ethical And Constitutional Argument For Prosecutorial Discretion, David A. Lord

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

Within days of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, progressive prosecutors throughout the country announced that if their jurisdictions enacted restrictions on abortion, they would not prosecute the individuals who had these procedures or the doctors who performed them. This is the latest example of situations, like drug crimes, illegal gun possession, and other offenses, where prosecutors have declined to enforce a state law as a matter of public policy. Critics of this broad use of prosecutorial discretion have argued that it violates the constitutional separation of powers.

This Article argues that prosecutorial discretion is well-founded in American …

Pro-Choice (Of Law): Extraterritorial Application Of State Law Using Abortion As A Case Study, Marnie Leonard

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

Madison Underwood was scheduled to receive a life-saving abortion at a clinic in Tennessee when her doctor told her the procedure had been canceled. The Supreme Court had overturned the constitutional right to abortion a few days prior. Although Underwood’s abortion was still legal in Tennessee, her doctor felt performing the procedure was too risky with the law changing so quickly.

Interpleader As A Vehicle For Challenging The Constitutionality Of Private Citizen Action Statutes, Delia Parker

Fordham Law Review

The rise of vigilante-esque statutes creates obstacles for litigants seeking to challenge a statute’s constitutionality. State legislatures in Texas and California enacted laws regulating constitutionally protected activity (abortion and firearm possession, respectively) through statutes enforced solely by private actors. The state legislatures cleverly crafted Texas S.B. 8, as well as other copycat statutes, as bounty hunter statutes to block litigants’ usual path to pre-enforcement adjudication—filing a claim against the state to enjoin its actors from enforcing the improper provisions.

The Texas and California state legislatures attempted to forbid constitutionally protected conduct by granting enforcement power to an infinite number of …

Reevaluating Regional Law Reform Strategies After Dobbs, Jamie Abrams

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This article studies the triad of 2016 social media campaigns known as “#AskDr.Kasich,” “#askbevinaboutmyvag,” and “#PeriodsforPence.” While these campaigns, each located in the regional mid-South, were motivated by restrictive state abortion bills, they uniquely positioned menstruation and women’s bodies at the center of their activism—not abortion alone. They leveraged, as a political fault line, the contradiction of these states’ governors’ perceived disgust relating to basic women’s reproductive health, relative to their patriarchal assuredness in regulating and controlling women’s bodies.

In so doing, they tapped into meaningful disruptions in the geographies, religiosities, and masculinities of abortion politics. These campaigns achieved regional …

The Ripple Effects Of Dobbs On Health Care Beyond Wanted Abortion, Maya Manian

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

The Supreme Court’s momentous decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to overturn fifty years of precedent on the constitutional right to abortion represents a sea of change, not only in constitutional law, but also in the public health landscape. Although state laws on abortion are still evolving after Dobbs, the decision almost immediately wreaked havoc on the delivery of medical care for both patients seeking abortion care and those not actively seeking to terminate a pregnancy.

This Article also argues that focusing the public’s attention on the deleterious consequences of abortion bans for health care beyond wanted abortion …

The First Amendment And Online Access To Information About Abortion: The Constitutional And Technological Problems With Censorship, John Villasenor

Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property

To what extent could an abortion-restrictive state impede access to online information about abortion? After Dobbs, this question is no longer theoretical. This essay engages with this issue from both a legal and technological perspective, analyzing First Amendment jurisprudence as well as the technological implications of state-level online censorship. It concludes that the weight of Supreme Court precedent indicates that state attempts to censor information regarding out-of-state abortion services would violate the First Amendment. That said, the essay also recognizes that as Dobbs itself upended precedent, it is unclear what Supreme Court would do when ruling on questions regarding …

Transgender Rural Communities And Legal Rights To Gender-Affirming Health Care, Valarie K. Blake, Nathan R. Hamons

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Birthing Alone, Elizabeth Kukura

Washington and Lee Law Review

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, hospitals implemented restrictive visitor policies that have prevented many pregnant people from giving birth with their chosen support people. For some, this meant foregoing labor and delivery support by a birth doula, someone who serves in a nonclinical role and provides emotional, physical, and informational support to birthing people. Given that continuous labor support such as the care provided by doulas is associated with fewer cesareans and other interventions, less need for pain medication, and shorter labors, the promotion of doula care is a promising strategy to ease the maternal health crisis and, in particular, shrink …

Leave Them Kids Alone: State Constitutional Protections For Gender-Affirming Healthcare, Jessica Matsuda

Washington and Lee Law Review

State legislatures across the nation are continually targeting the rights of transgender individuals with a variety of laws affecting everything from bathrooms to medical care. One particularly invasive type of legislation, the gender-affirming healthcare ban, seeks to prohibit all forms of healthcare that align a person’s physical traits with their gender identity for individuals under eighteen. Bans like this severely impede the treatment necessary for transgender youth suffering from gender dysphoria, which carries serious physical consequences and sometimes fatal psychological repercussions. As legislative sessions pass, more and more states are introducing and actually enacting these bans

Striking down these bans …

Antiabortion Civil Remedies And Unwed Fatherhood As Genetic Entitlement, Yvonne F. Lindgren

Faculty Works

Antiabortion civil remedy laws in effect in five states grant putative fathers the right to sue abortion providers for wrongful death regardless of their relationship to the gestating parent. While these laws represent an important new development in the movement to restrict the abortion right, they also expand parental recognition of unwed fathers. Constitutional law requires that unwed fathers who seek to assert parental rights must establish that they possess both biological connection and a relationship with their child or the gestating parent—what has come to be known as “biology-plus.” However, antiabortion civil remedy laws vest parental recognition and rights …

Sidelined Again: How The Government Abandoned Working Women Amidst A Global Pandemic, Jessica K. Fink

Faculty Scholarship

Among the weaknesses within American society exposed by the COVID pandemic, almost none has emerged more starkly than the government’s failure to provide meaningful and affordable childcare to working families—and, in particular, to working women. As the pandemic unfolded in the spring of 2020, state and local governments shuttered schools and daycare facilities and directed nannies and other babysitters to “stay at home.” Women quickly found themselves filling this domestic void, providing the overwhelming majority of childcare, educational support for their children, and management of household duties, often to the detriment of their careers. As of March 2021, more than …

Abortion Rights And Disability Equality: A New Constitutional Battleground, Allison M. Whelan, Michele Goodwin

Washington and Lee Law Review

Abortion rights and access are under siege in the United States. Even while current state-level attacks take on a newly aggressive scale and scope—emboldened by the United States Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey—the legal landscape emerging in the wake of Dobbs is decades in the making. In this Article, we analyze the pre- and post-Roe landscapes, explaining that after the Supreme Court recognized a right to abortion in Roe in 1973, anti-abortionists sought to dismantle that right, first …

Cruel Dilemmas In Contemporary Fertility Care: Problematizing America's Failure To Assure Access To Fertility Preservation For Trans Youth, Anna Reed

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Transgender youth are increasingly able to access gender-affirming healthcare. Because gender-affirming care such as hormone therapy is clinically shown to reduce gender dysphoria and ease physical and social transition, every major U.S. medical association recognizes that gender-affirming healthcare is medically necessary for the treatment of dysphoria. However, an important dimension of gender-affirming care remains under-insured and overpriced: fertility preservation (FP). Several studies indicate that hormone therapies and certain gender-affirming surgeries can have negative, long-term impacts on future fertility. Although these impacts can be mitigated through approved FP methods such as sperm cryopreservation and oocyte cryopreservation, such methods are rarely affordable …