Health Law and Policy Commons^™

Public Health Product Hops, Michael S. Sinha

All Faculty Scholarship

Pharmaceutical product hops are anticompetitive maneuvers that often represent a last-ditch effort by brand manufacturers to preserve market share in the face of generic competition. An integral part of product life cycle management strategies, product hops may offer marginal benefits to patients but can substantially increase costs to payers and patients alike. Yet industry advocates maintain that this is essential follow-on research and development, resulting in the development of novel products that would otherwise never reach the market.

Is there a middle ground between these two diametrically opposed views? Might certain product hops be considered beneficial, perhaps if they furthered …

Dobbs In A Technologized World: Implications For Us Data Privacy, Jheel Gosain, Jason D. Keune, Michael S. Sinha

All Faculty Scholarship

In June of 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning 50 years of precedent by eliminating the federal constitutional right to abortion care established by the Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. The Dobbs decision leaves the decision about abortion services in the hands of the states, which created an immediately variegated checkerboard of access to women’s healthcare across the country. This in turn laid bare a profusion of privacy issues that emanate from our technologized world. We review these privacy issues, including healthcare data, financial data, website tracking and …

The Psychology Of Science Denialism And Lessons For Public Health Authorities, Brenna Moreno, Molly J. Walker Wilson

All Faculty Scholarship

As it wreaked tragedy on the world, the outbreak of COVID-19 helped expose a pandemic of a different kind, one steeped in distrust and contrarianism. This movement, termed science denialism, has been lurking and undermining public health efforts for decades. Specifically, it is “the employment of rhetorical arguments to give the appearance of legitimate debate where there is none, an approach that has the ultimate goal of rejecting a proposition on which a scientific consensus exists.” Unlike skepticism, which is “doubt as to the truth of something” and works to progress both science and society, denialism is characterized by individuals’ …

Increasing Compliance With International Pandemic Law: International Relations And New Global Health Agreements, Matthew M. Kavanagh, Clare Wenham, Elize Massard Da Fonseca, Laurence R. Helfer, Elvin Nyukuri, Allan Maleche, Sam F. Halabi, Adi Radhakrishnan, Attiya Waris

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

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 …

Conditions Of Confinement In Nova Scotia Jails Designated For Men: East Coast Prison Justice Society Visiting Committee Annual Report 2021-2022, Sheila Wildeman, Harry Critchley, Hanna Garson, Laura Beach, Margaret-Anne Mchugh

Reports & Public Policy Documents

This is the second Annual Report of the East Coast Prison Justice Society (“ECPJS”) Visiting Committee (“VC”).

The purpose of the ECPJS VC is to bring increased accountability and transparency to the Nova Scotia correctional system in light of human rights standards, domestic and international. While the Elizabeth Fry Society of Mainland Nova Scotia provides human rights monitoring of conditions of incarceration experienced by women and non-binary people in federal prisons and provincial jails in the Atlantic region, and the federal Office of Correctional Investigator provides further oversight of conditions in federal prisons, there is no comparable independent oversight of …

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 …

Concordance Of International Regulation Of Pediatric Health Research, Ellen W. Clayton, Mark A. Rothstein Jd, Et Al.

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

International, multi-site, pediatric health research has shown great promise by vastly increasing the amount and heterogeneity of biospecimens and clinical records. However, considerable impediments are created by the significant costs and delays associated with obtaining regulatory approval in numerous countries, which is often complicated by varying and sometimes opaque research ethics standards and procedures. Although it is unlikely that the global community could reach consensus on a single set of research ethics policies and procedures, voluntary policy pronouncements by countries agreeing to defer to the approval of research ethics bodies in other countries might be a way forward.

Deference is …

Differences By Race And Ethnicity In Title Ix's Effect On Women's Health, W. Kip Viscusi, Joni Hersch, Delaney Beck

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Title IX greatly expanded adolescent females’ participation in athletic activities, which may have led to health benefits that extend into later life. Previous research has not explored whether health benefits arising from Title IX differ by race or ethnicity and has not examined women at older ages when health problems become more evident. This article examines the effect of Title IX on racial and ethnicity disparities in health outcomes by considering women aged 42–52 years. White women in these age groups exhibit declines in their self-assessed health status and increases in many health-related ailments, consistent with other evidence on temporal …

Compensating Differentials For Occupational Health And Safety Risks: Implications Of Recend Evidence, W. Kip Viscusi, Thomas J. Kniesner

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The most enduring measure of how individuals make personal decisions affecting their health and safety is the compensating wage differential for job safety risk revealed in the labor market via hedonic equilibrium outcomes. The decisions in turn reveal the value of a statistical life (VSL), the value of a statistical injury (VSI), and the value of a statistical life year (VSLY), which have both mortality and morbidity aspects that we describe and apply here. All such tradeoff rates play important roles in policy decisions concerning improving individual welfare. Specifically, we explicate the recent empirical research on VSL and its related …

The Rise And Fall Of A Reproductive Right: Dobbs V. Jackson Women’S Health Organization, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

Although the phrase “Post-Roe Era” is still used by those who want to underscore the loss wrought last June by Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, it is only a matter of time before the present state of reproductive constitutionalism solidifies into the more authoritarian “Dobbs Era.” In these early days of transition, states are still figuring out what they want the legal status of abortion to be, ever since Dobbs overruled both Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, thus tossing the issue of abortion’s legality back to the states for …

An Epidemic In Enforceability: A Growing Need For Individual Autonomy In Health Care Data-Privacy Protection In An Era Of Digital Tracking, Madeline Knight

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

The health care system in the United States is under conflicting pressures. From one angle, there is a demand for the highest standard of care, which includes efficient, confidential communications between doctors and patients. From another, however, the technology that has facilitated such efficiency has outpaced the security mechanisms currently in place to protect a long-recognized right to privacy. In an era of data tracking, the important privacy interest that Congress has recognized since 1996 confronts a growing threat of data commodification. Despite significant potential consequences, however, there is neither guaranteed statutory recovery nor cohesion among states for the process …

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 …

Come As You Are?: Democratizing Healthcare Through Black Church - Telehealth Initiatives, Meighan Parker

Scholarly Works

Drawing from the phrase “come as you are,” which is frequently used in Black Churches to encourage and welcome people to church spaces for spiritual restoration and healing irrespective of their various social and economic dispositions, this Article aims to describe how telehealth partnerships with community organizations, such as Black Churches, can help democratize healthcare.

In this project, I develop two models for Black Church-Telehealth Initiatives—a Telehealth Clinic on the Church’s campus and a Designated Telehealth Space with the requisite technology to facilitate telehealth encounters—to argue that Black Church-Telehealth Initiatives can help address certain social determinants of health, such as …

National Federation Of Independent Business V. Sebelius, 567 U.S. 519 (2012), Elizabeth Weeks, Mary Ann Chirba, Alice A. Noble

Scholarly Works

In National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, decided in 2012, twenty-six states as well as private individuals and an organization of independent businesses challenged the constitutionality of two key components of the Affordable Care Act. The Court upheld the individual mandate but converted the Medicaid eligibility expansion from mandatory to optional for states. Elizabeth Weeks’ feminist rewrite breaks down the public law-private law distinction to get beyond the traditional view of health insurance as a commercial product providing individual financial protection against risk and instead to view it as effecting a risk pool premised on cross-subsidization of the health-care …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Investment Bankers And Inclusive Corporate Leadership, Afra Afsharipour

Seattle University Law Review

Few major deals happen without the engagement and advice of investment bankers. Whether a company is undertaking an initial public offering or engaging in a large merger or acquisition deal, investment bankers play a central role in advising corporate executives. Successful investment bankers are devoted to cultivating relationships with executives. And these relationships place bankers in a position to earn tens of millions in fees for their advisory and service roles in connection with corporate dealmaking. Investment bankers’ constant endeavors to nurture relationships with executives, while also maximizing their own ability to enhance fees, commonly leads to allegations of double-dealing, …

Beyond The Business Case: Moving From Transactional To Transformational Inclusion, Jamillah Bowman Williams

Seattle University Law Review

While workplace diversity is a hot topic, the extent to which the diversity management movement has effectively improved intergroup relations and reduced racial inequality remains unclear.1 Despite large investments in diversity and inclusion training and other company wide initiatives, historically excluded groups remain vastly underrepresented in leadership and the most lucrative careers, such as finance, law, and technology. This calls the efficacy of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts into question, particularly with respect to reducing racial inequality in the workplace.

This Article explains why it is time for organizational leaders to move beyond the transactional case for diversity and …

Reframing The Dei Case, Veronica Root Martinez

Seattle University Law Review

Corporate firms have long expressed their support for the idea that their organizations should become more demographically diverse while creating a culture that is inclusive of all members of the firm. These firms have traditionally, however, not been successful at improving demographic diversity and true inclusion within the upper echelons of their organizations. The status quo seemed unlikely to move, but expectations for corporate firms were upended after the #MeToo Movement of 2017 and 2018, which was followed by corporate support of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement in 2020. These two social movements, while distinct in many ways, forced firms to rethink …

Women In Shareholder Activism, Sarah C. Haan

Seattle University Law Review

Even a cursory review of the history of American environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) shareholder activism reveals the presence of women leaders. This Article sketches some of this history and interrogates the role of women in the shareholder activism movement. That movement typically has involved claims by minority shareholders to corporate power; activists are nearly always on the margins of power, though minority shareholders may, collectively, represent a majority interest. This Article ascribes women’s leadership in shareholder activism to their longstanding position as outsiders to corporate organization. Women’s participation in shaping corporate policy—even from the margins—has provided women with …

How Firms Turn Middle Managers Into Diversity Leaders, Alexandra Kalev, Frank Dobbin

Seattle University Law Review

In 2007, the Conference Board published a piece calling middle managers “the biggest roadblock to diversity and inclusion” for standing in the way of change efforts. Today, many chief diversity officers report that they have failed both to diversify middle management and to get middle managers involved in promoting inclusion. We explore popular diversity programs that create “paper” or “symbolic” principles for achieving diversity (diversity policy statements and guidelines for hiring, promotion, and discharge), as well as programs that engage middle managers in promoting diversity (special recruitment and mentoring programs, and diversity task forces). “Paper” policies often fall flat, but …

Gender And The Constitutional Theory Of The Firm, Jamee K. Moudud

Seattle University Law Review

This Article adds to the literature that has linked feminist economics to foreign trade and development. It argues that two key factors need to be in place jointly if efforts to promote gender equity are to succeed. On the one hand it argues that foreign debt is an important constraint to domestic progressive social policies of all kinds as it increases the power of international creditors who generally tend to support austerity policies. On the other hand, while alleviating the burden of foreign debt via exportpromotion policies is necessary, it is by no means a sufficient condition to promote domestic …

Court’S Choice Of Law Ruling Undermines Washington Community Property Law: A Critique Of Shanghai Commercial Bank V. Chang, Brian D. Hulse

Seattle University Law Review

This Article deals with the issues that arise when Washington courts face the following scenario. One spouse enters into a contract without the joinder (and perhaps without the knowledge) of the other spouse. Both spouses are domiciled in Washington. The contract has contacts with one or more jurisdictions other than Washington and is generally governed as to validity and interpretation by the law of another jurisdiction. The contracting spouse defaults and the other party to the contract obtains a judgment on the contract. The court confronts a question about the property to which the plaintiff will have recourse to collect …

Policing For Profit: A Constitutional Analysis Of Washington State’S Civil Forfeiture Laws, Julia Doherty

Seattle University Law Review

The summer of 2020 reignited a conversation about the relationship between race and policing in the United States. While many have taken the opportunity to scrutinize the racially discriminate components of our criminal justice system, comparable aspects of civil law must be equally scrutinized. A particular area of concern pertains to racially biased policing and the concept of “policing for profits” with Black, Indigenous, and people of color communities (BIPOC), which is accomplished mainly through civil asset forfeiture at a state and federal level.

The World Moved On Without Me: Redefining Contraband In A Technology-Driven World For Youth Detained In Washington State, Stephanie A. Lowry

Seattle University Law Review

If you ask a teenager in the United States to show you one of their favorite memories, they will likely show you a picture or video on their cell phone. This is because Americans, especially teenagers, love cell phones. Ninety-seven percent of all Americans own a cell phone according to a continuously updated survey by the Pew Research Center. For teenagers aged thirteen to seventeen, the number is roughly 95%. For eighteen to twenty-nine-year-olds, the number grows to 100%. On average, eight to twelve-year-old’s use roughly five and a half hours of screen media per day, in comparison to thirteen …

“What’S Past Is Prologue”: The Story Of The Sale Of The University Of Puget Sound School Of Law To Seattle University, Annette E. Clark

Seattle University Law Review

When the Seattle University Law Review editorial staff invited me to write an updated history of the Seattle University School of Law in honor of our 50th anniversary, I planned to start the narrative with the year 1989, which was where the prior written history (authored by former Law Library Director Anita Steele and published by the Law Review) had left off. It also happens to be the year when I graduated from this law school and joined the tenure-track faculty, so 1989 seemed like a propitious place to begin. However, as I began to do the research necessary to …

A Path Forward: Litigating The Treaty-Based Claims Of Children Sexually Abused In The Indian Health Service System, Peter B. Janci, Stephen F. Crew, Zachary Pangares

Seattle University Law Review

In 1855, representatives for the United States traveled to the Great Plains with orders to seek peace with Blackfoot Nation so the westward expansion of “civilized” white settlers could continue without interruption. After weeks of negotiations, the United States plan materialized. The terms of these promises were memorialized on October 17, 1855, in a treaty between the United States government and Blackfoot Nation.

One hundred and sixty-seven years later, representatives for the United States and the Blackfoot Nation convened in Rapid City, South Dakota to discuss the U.S. government’s breach of the treaty’s terms. Eight Native men, including three from …

Army Commander’S Role—The Judge, Jury, & Prosecutor For The Article 15, Anthony Godwin

Seattle University Law Review

Service members in the armed forces are bound by a different set of rules when compared to other U.S. citizens. Some of the normal safeguards and protections that civilians enjoy are much more restrictive for military service members, and this is generally for a good reason. Such restrictions are partly due to the complex demands and needs of the United States military. Congress and the President have entrusted military commanders with special powers that enable them to handle minor violations of law without needing to go through a full judicial proceeding. Non-judicial punishments (NJP), also known as Article 15s, are …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents