Health Law and Policy Commons^™

Two-Dimensional Doctrine And Three-Dimensional Law: A Response To Professor Weinstein, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Weinstein examines how the IRB laws would fare under Supreme Court doctrine, and whereas it is my view that these laws should be considered unconstitutional, he reaches largely the opposite conclusion. His article therefore offers a valuable opportunity for further exploration of the constitutional questions, and although there is not sufficient space here to discuss all of his analysis, it seems important at least to draw attention to the major points on which we take different perspectives.

International Union, U.A.W. V. Johnson Controls: The History Of Litigation Alliances And Mobilization To Challenge Fetal Protection Policies, Caroline Bettinger-Lopez, Susan P. Sturm

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court's decision in Johnson Controls is the culmination of a long legal campaign by labor, women's rights, and workplace safety advocates to invalidate restrictions on women's employment based on pregnancy. This campaign powerfully demonstrates the use of amicus briefs as opportunities to link the efforts of groups with overlapping agendas and to shape the Supreme Court's understanding of the surrounding empirical, social and political context. But Johnson Controls also provides important lessons about the narrowing effects and fragility of litigation-centered mobilization. The case affirmed an important anti-discrimination principle but ironically left women (and men) with the right to …

Shape Stops Story, Elizabeth F. Emens

Faculty Scholarship

Storytelling and resistance are powerful tools of both lawyering and individual identity, as I argue in this brief essay published in Narrative as part of a dialogue on disability, narrative, and law with Rosemarie Garland-Thompson and Ellen Barton. Garland-Thompson's work shows us the life-affirming potential of storytelling, its role in shaping disability identity, and its role in communicating that identity to the outside world. By contrast, Barton powerfully shows how those same life-affirming narratives can force a certain kind of storytelling, can create a mandate to tell one story and not another. In short, Barton reminds us of the need …

Developing Markets In Baby-Making: In The Matter Of Baby M, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

In this Essay, I want to explore the Baby M case from a different, less philosophical perspective. The question I pose is simply this: how did the Sterns and the Whiteheads find one another in the first place? After all, apart from their New Jersey location (and a shared fondness for Bruce Springsteen), the two couples had little in common. Mary Beth was a high school dropout; Betsy had a Ph.D. and M.D. from the University of Michigan. Rick was a Vietnam vet fighting an ongoing battle with unemployment and alcoholism; Bill led what close friends called "a quiet, industrious …

Multinational Enterprises And Workplace Reproductive Health: Extending Corporate Social Responsibility, Rebecca K. Atkins

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Corporate social responsibility is a relatively new approach to the protection of human rights. While the human rights to whole-body health and workplace health are long-standing, the right to reproductive health is a new topic of discussion. This Note examines the right to reproductive health in the workplace and proposes that it would be best protected by imposing an affirmative duty on multi-national enterprises via corporate social responsibility. Origins of human rights, corporate social responsibility, and reproductive health are discussed before turning to the developing stalemate between multi-national enterprises and less developed countries.

Attack Of The Balloon People, Keith E. Sealing

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Any discussion of food security would, at first blush, seem to focus primarily on world hunger and other threats to the safety of the food supply, whether intentionally man-made (e.g., terrorism), inadvertently man-made (e.g., global warming), made-for-profit by industrial agriculture (referred to as "industrial food" throughout this Article), or "natural" although arguably man-abetted (such as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease). And hunger is indeed a problem and likely to become more of a problem. However, this Article focuses on the long term threat to world health and world food security caused by the American way of eating; the …

Global Health And Human Rights Imperative, Patricia C. Kuszler

Articles

Open any magazine, click on a television news channel, or surf the net and you are likely to find global health highlighted as one of the foremost challenges of new millennium. First, this article will consider the meaning and measures of global health and detail the path to improved health and development prescribed by the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. Second, it will trace the development of international human rights law as it relates to health. Third, it demonstrate how human rights and health, long traversing parallel routes, are in fact converging in the 21st Century quest for global health–a …

The Empire Of Illness: Competence And Coercion In Health-Care Decision Making, Marsha Garrison

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Foodborne Infections And The Global Food Supply: Improving Health At Home And Abroad, Robert V. Tauxe

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

In recent years, fourteen percent of the U.S. food supply has been imported from other countries, including many fresh and perishable foods. Although most outbreaks of illness and individual cases are related to foods from the United States, large and unusual outbreaks have been traced to imported foods that were likely contaminated in the country of origin. Investigation of these outbreaks requires collaboration across several disciplines as well as across international borders. Successful investigation can not only control the original problem, but can also inform public authorities in both countries about the need for strategies to prevent similar outbreaks from …

Unenumerated Rights And The Limits Of Analogy: A Critque Of The Right To Medical Self-Defense, O. Carter Snead

Journal Articles

Volokh’s project stands or falls with the claim that the entitlement he proposes is of constitutional dimension. If there is no fundamental right to medical self-defense, the individual must, for better or worse, yield to the regulation of this domain in the name of the values agreed to by the political branches of government. Indeed, the government routinely restricts the instrumentalities of self-help (including self-defense) in the name of avoiding what it takes to be more significant harms. This same rationale accounts for current governmental limitations on access to unapproved drugs and the current ban on organ sales. The FDA …

Is An Accrued Cause Of Action For Copyright Infringement More Like A Kidney Or A Contract?, Bryanne J. Schmitt

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Hiv Testing Of Pregnant Women: Why Present Approaches Fail To Reach The Desired Objective & The Unconsidered Option, Michelle Yuen

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Battling Breast Cancer: New York's Laws Are Not Enough, Tara Arschin

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The note argues that New York State should mandate insurance coverage for participation in Phase II and Phase III clinical trials for experimental breast cancer treatments, such as HDCABMT, to address gaps in current law and ensure access to potentially life-saving therapies. While New York has progressive laws on breast cancer awareness and treatment rights, its approach to experimental treatment coverage remains inadequate compared to states like California and Massachusetts. The note advocates for legal reforms to eliminate the need for external appeals and reduce litigation, ensuring consistent and equitable access to clinical trials.

The Road From Massachusetts To Missouri: What Will It Take For Other States To Replicate Massachusetts Health Reform?, Sidney D. Watson, Timothy Mcbride, Heather Bednarek, Muhammad Islam

All Faculty Scholarship

In April 2006, the Massachusetts Legislature passed Chapter 58 of the Acts of 2006, An Act Providing Access to Affordable, Quality, Accountable Health Care, sweeping health reform legislation designed to achieve nearly universal health insurance coverage.¹ While Massachusetts is not the first state in recent years to enact legislation intended to achieve near-universal coverage, its efforts have attracted the most national attention and the most notice from other states interested in duplicating the Massachusetts Model.

Fortuitous political and budgetary circumstances converged in Massachusetts to move reform forward. First, stakeholders and elected officials worked together over a number of years …

Polluting Medical Judgment? False Assumptions In The Pursuit Of False Claims Regarding Off-Label Prescribing, Sandra H. Johnson

All Faculty Scholarship

Over half of the FDA-approved prescription medications taken by patients are prescribed for a different purpose, in a higher or lower dose, for a discrete population, or over a longer period of time than that for which the drug was approved. Safety and efficacy concerns attract the most attention; but critical benefits in fostering innovation and providing patients with medications that may be uniquely effective for them are often overlooked.

The current dominant public policy response to off-label prescribing addresses this practice as a particular breed of financial conflicts of interest in which pharmaceutical firms pollute medical judgment by appealing …

Striving For Equality, But Settling For The Status Quo: Is Title Vi More Illusory Than Real?, Ruqaiijah Yearby

All Faculty Scholarship

A plethora of empirical studies, such as the Institute of Medicine’s Unequal Treatment report, have shown that racial inequities in health care continue at the same level as in the Jim Crow Era. Innumerable reasons have been offered to explain the continuation of these health inequities, including racial discrimination. Congress enacted Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to put an end to racial discrimination in health care, but it still persists. Given the regulation and enforcement mechanisms established under Title VI explicitly aimed at remedying racial discrimination such as that directed at elderly African-Americans it is unbelievable …

The Health Care Choice Act: The Individual Insurance Market And The Politics Of 'Choice', Elizabeth Pendo

All Faculty Scholarship

Traditionally, employer-sponsored group insurance plans have been the backbone of health insurance coverage in the United States. While it is still true that most Americans get their health insurance through their employment, the erosion of employer-sponsored health insurance has increased the ranks of the uninsured and pushed more workers, retirees and their families into the individual insurance market. In 2005, for example, nine percent of the population, or nearly 27 million people, turned to individual policies for health insurance coverage.

The Health Care Choice Act of 2005 (the "Act") currently before Congress aims to reform perceived problems in the individual …

Federalism Doctrines And Abortion Cases: A Response To Professor Fallon, Anthony J. Bellia Jr.

Journal Articles

This Essay is a response to Professor Richard Fallon's article, If Roe Were Overruled: Abortion and the Constitution in a Post-Roe World. In that article, Professor Fallon argues that if the Supreme Court were to overrule Roe v. Wade, courts might well remain in the abortion-umpiring business. This Essay proposes a refinement on that analysis. It argues that in a post-Roe world courts would not necessarily subject questions involving abortion to the same kind of constitutional analysis in which the Court has engaged in Roe and its progeny, that is, balancing a state's interest in protecting life against a pregnant …

Abortion, Equality, And Administrative Regulation, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

Abortion and equality are a common pairing; courts as well as legal scholars have noted the importance of abortion and a woman's ability to control whether and when she has children to her ability to participate fully and equally in society. Abortion and administrative regulation, on the other hand, are a more unusual combination. Most restrictions on abortion are legislatively imposed, while guarantees of reproductive freedom are constitutionally derived, so administrative law does not frequently figure in debates about access to abortion.

The Social Security Administration's New Disability Adjudication Rules: A Significant And Promising Reform, Frank S. Bloch, Jeffrey S. Lubbers, Paul R. Verkuil

Articles

The article evaluates the Social Security Administration's (SSA) new Disability Service Improvement (DSI) process, introduced in 2006, which aims to address inefficiencies and inconsistencies in disability adjudication. The reforms include key innovations such as Quick Disability Determinations (QDDs), the Medical and Vocational Expert System (MVES), and the replacement of the Appeals Council with the Decision Review Board (DRB). While the reforms represent a significant and promising step toward improving the disability determination process, the article identifies remaining concerns, particularly regarding the role of the Federal Reviewing Official (FRO) and rules for submitting evidence at administrative hearings.

Cigarette Smoking As A Public Health Hazard: Crafting Common Law And Legislative Strategies For Abatemen, George P. Smith Ii

Scholarly Articles

The debate over when, and to what extent, the government may regulate public smoking, is a contentious one of great moment. The point at which the line will be drawn with regard to an individual's right to smoke in public is narrowing. This right may stop at public restaurants and the workplace; or it may reach as far as public stadia, outdoor gathering spots and public streets. In 2006, one report showed 461 municipalities in thirty-three states and the District of Columbia, had adopted one-hundred percent smoke-free coverage in restaurants, bars or workplaces; and 135 municipalities had one-hundred percent coverage …

Turning The Health Professional Carousel: Is Canada Undermining Human Rights In Developing Countries?, Karinne Lantz

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This article will address the issue of health professional migration, with a specific focus on how this migration affects health systems in developing countries. The central question being examined is whether or not states have an obligation to ensure that their policies – or actions by private actors based in their states – do not undermine the delivery of healthcare in other states. After exploring this obligation, this article will analyze how the issue may be effectively addressed by drawing upon the experience of the United Kingdom; how successful has the U.K. been in meeting its obligation? What are the …

A Comprehensive Analysis Of Mri Research Risks: In Support Of Full Disclosure, Jennifer Marshall, Toby Martin, Jocelyn Downie, Krisztina Malisza

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) procedures have been used for over 20 years. This modality is considered relatively safe and holds great promise. Yet, MRI has a number of risks. In order for MRI research to meet the Canadian standard of disclosure, the investigator must communicate and make note of all risks in their research protocols and consent forms. Those creating and reviewing research protocols and consent forms must take notice of the different circumstances under which MRI poses a risk. First, this paper will describe the current standard of disclosure in Canada for research participants. Second, the paper will provide …

When Is It Permissable To Dismiss A Family Who Refuses Vaccinces? Legal, Ethical And Public Health Perspectives, Beth Halperin, Ryan Melnychuk, Jocelyn Downie, Noni Macdonald

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Although immunization is one of the most important health inter- ventions of the 20th century, cases of infectious disease continue to occur. There are parents who refuse immunization for their children, creating a dilemma for the primary care physician who must consider the best interest of the individual child as well as that of the commu- nity. Some physicians, when faced with parents who refuse immuniza- tion on behalf of their children, choose to dismiss these families from their practice. Given the existing shortage of primary care physicians across Canada, this decision to dismiss families based on vaccine refusal has …

Testing The Waters: Jurisdictional And Policy Aspects Of The Continuing Failure To Remedy Drinking Water Quality On First Nations Reserves, Constance Macintosh

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This paper considers why, from a policy and legal perspective, there is such a disparity between the water quality on First Nations reserves, and that experienced in the majority of other Canadian communities. This involves engaging with how jurisdictional allocations, governmental policies, statutory or policy-del-egated mandates, and operational practices con-verge. In this discussion, two inter-related tensions emerge. The first is between Aboriginal aspirations to self-govern and community capacity to effectively engage in governance activities. The second is Canada's proper role and responsibilities in resolving the governance/capacity tension, and in resolving the water quality problems.

This paper ultimately concludes that the …

Achieving Transparency In Implementing Abortion Laws, Rebecca Cook, Joanna Erdman, Bernard Dickens

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

National and international courts and tribunals are increasingly ruling that although states may aim to deter unlawful abortion by criminal penalties, they bear a parallel duty to inform physicians and patients of when abortion is lawful. The fear is that women are unjustly denied safe medical procedures to which they are legally entitled, because without such information physicians are deterred from involvement. With particular attention to the European Court of Human Rights, the UN Human Rights Committee, the Constitutional Court of Colombia, the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal, and the US Supreme Court, decisions are explained that show the responsibility …

Respecting Adolescents' Confidentiality And Reproductive And Sexual Choices, Rebecca Cook, Joanna Erdman, Bernard Dickens

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Adolescents, defined as between 10 and 19 years old, present a growing challenge to reproductive health. Adolescent sexual intercourse contributes to worldwide burdens of unplanned pregnancy, abortion, spread of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including HIV, and maternal mortality and morbidity. A barrier to contraceptive care and termination of adolescent pregnancy is the belief that in law minors intellectually mature enough to give consent also require consent of, or at least prior information to, their parental guardians. Adolescents may avoid parental disclosure by forgoing desirable reproductive health care. Recent judicial decisions, however, give effect to internationally established human rights to confidentiality, …

Guiding Patrons To Online Health Information: Can Librarians Be Found Liable?, Elaine Gibson

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The amount of health information available on the Internet is growing rapidly and information intermediaries are increasingly being asked to help information seekers find and make sense of this information. This activity is for the most part benign from a legal perspective. However, there is a small possibility that, should the intermediary steer an information seeker to information that proves harmful to the seeker, the intermediary may be found liable for injuries incurred. In this paper, we examine the theoretical underpinnings of the relevant laws, clarify the risks, and recommend ways to minimize risk.

Respecting Adolescents' Confidentiality And Reproductive And Sexual Choices, Rebecca J. Cook, Joanna Erdman, Bernard M. Dickens

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Adolescents, defined as between 10 and 19 years old, present a growing challenge to reproductive health. Adolescent sexual intercourse contributes to worldwide burdens of unplanned pregnancy, abortion, spread of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including HIV, and maternal mortality and morbidity. A barrier to contraceptive care and termination of adolescent pregnancy is the belief that in law minors intellectually mature enough to give consent also require consent of, or at least prior information to, their parental guardians. Adolescents may avoid parental disclosure by forgoing desirable reproductive health care. Recent judicial decisions, however, give effect to internationally established human rights to confidentiality, …

In The Back Alleys Of Health Care: Abortion, Equality And Community In Canada, Joanna Erdman

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The decriminalization of abortion in Canada ensured neither its availability nor accessibility as an integrated and publicly funded health service. While Canadian women are increasingly referred to or seek abortion services from single-purpose clinics, their exclusion from public health insurance often render these services inaccessible. This article considers denied funding for clinic abortion services from the perspective of the Canadian constitutional guarantee of sex equality. The article focuses on the 2004 Court of Queen's Bench's judgment in Jane Doe I v. Manitoba, which framed denied public funding for clinic abortion services as a violation of women's equality rights under the …