Law and Society Commons^™

The Lancet Commission On Global Health Law: The Transformative Power Of Law To Advance The Right To Health, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

A new report by The Lancet-O’Neill-Georgetown University Commission on Global Health and the Law shows how law can fulfill the global pledge of the human right to health, while “leaving no one behind.” I call this “global health with justice.” We need both health and justice. By global health, I mean ever increasing indicators of good health and increased longevity in all countries around the world. By justice I mean that the global “good” of health must be fairly distributed both within and among countries. The Lancet Commission report offers a comprehensive roadmap towards realizing the law’s power to make …

Law And Power In Health Care: Challenges To Physician Control, Mary Anne Bobinski

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Just Care: A Relational Approach To Autonomy And Decision Making Of Parents Committed To Religious Or Indigenous Traditional Practices, Tu-Quynh Trinh

LLM Theses

Hamilton Health Sciences Corp. v. D.H. and B. (R.) v. Children’s Aid Society of Metropolitan Toronto tell important stories about people and relationships—and about parenthood; autonomy; religious believers and cultural communities; and the role of the state in family, culture, and religion. Their narratives were influenced by liberalism and emphasize a degree of individualism that is incongruous given the subject matter of parent child relationships and their place within communities and the law. This thesis explores the application of relational theory and the integrated principles of justice and care to these issues. Ultimately, the stories these judicial opinions tell help …

The Impact Of H.B. 214: A Critical Analysis Of The Texas "Rape Insurance" Bill, Lucie Arvallo

St. Mary's Law Journal

Texas House Bill 214 (H.B. 214) is subject to challenge under the Supreme Court precedent protecting a woman’s right to choose. Passed in 2017, H.B. 214 regulates Texas insurance markets by prohibiting coverage for an elective abortion unless a woman affirmatively opts into such coverage through a separate contract and pays a separate premium. Similar restrictions on insurance coverage for elective abortion in other states have been met with mixed results in the courts. What sets H.B. 214 apart from other regulations of insurance coverage for abortion is that it does not include any exceptions for abortions in cases of …

The Plasticity Of The Body, The Injury, And The Claim: Personal Injury Claims In The Era Of Plastic Surgeries, Adi Youcht

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

The accelerated rise in the number of plastic surgeries has created an inflation of personal injury claims in connection with this cultural practice. This Article, on the one hand, aims to understand how the culture of plastic surgeries affects the tortious area of personal injury law (terms, concepts, goals, procedures, remedies, etc.), and on the other to understand how the significance of plastic surgery popular culture is designated by law. The Article suggests a new paradigm for defining personal injuries in order to face the legal challenges raised by plastic surgery culture and, in light of the culture’s re-designation by …

"I Assumed Chicago Would Be In The Forefront": Comments On The Movement To End Prostitution With Survivor-Leader Brenda Myers-Powell, Jody Raphael

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

For many years in the 2000’s, researcher Jody Raphael, teamed with prostitution-survivor Brenda Myers-Powell, undertook a myriad of speaking engagements in the Chicago metropolitan area, intended to raise awareness of the violence and coercion in the sex trade industry. Ten years ago, they were asked to make a video of their presentation. Recently, Dignity editors came across the video and asked for an update on the conversation. This piece is the result.

Hard Choices And Deficient Choosers, Mark Kelman

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

Bloody Hell: How Insufficient Access To Menstrual Hygiene Products Creates Inhumane Conditions For Incarcerated Women, Lauren Shaw

Texas A&M Law Review

For thousands of incarcerated women in the United States, dealing with menstruation is a nightmare. Across the country, many female prisoners lack sufficient access to feminine hygiene products, which negatively affects their health and rehabilitation. Although the international standards for the care of female prisoners have been raised in attempt to eliminate this issue, these stan- dards are often not followed in the United States. This Comment argues that denial of feminine hygiene products to female prisoners violates human de- cency. Additionally, this Comment considers possible constitutional violations caused by this denial, reviews current efforts to correct this problem, and …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Prescription For Charity Care: How National Medical Debt Ills Can Be Alleviated By Integrating State Financial Assistance Policies Into The Nonprofit Tax Exemption, Margarita Kutsin

Seattle University Law Review

Despite having the most expensive healthcare system in the world, the United States has been consistently ranked as having the worst system in terms of equity, efficiency, and healthcare outcomes among industrialized nations. The effects of these systemic issues are grounded in the patient experience as nearly forty-four percent of individuals have forgone recommended treatments and thirty-two percent have reported that they were unable to afford a prescription due to the high cost, according to a study conducted in 2018. Health is sacred, and financial circumstances should not determine the difference between treatment and illness, or life and death. “Financial …

Supervised Injection Facilities: Legal And Policy Reforms, Lawrence O. Gostin, James G. Hodge, Chelsea L. Gulinson

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that more than 70 000 deaths from drug overdoses occurred in 2017, including prescription and illicit opioids, representing a 6-fold increase since 1999. Innovative harm-reduction solutions are imperative. Supervised injection facilities (SIFs) create safe places for drug injection, including overdose prevention, counseling, and treatment referral services. Supervised injection facilities neither provide illicit drugs nor do their personnel inject users. Supervised injection facilities are effective in reducing drug-related mortality, morbidity, and needle-borne infections. Yet their lawfulness remains uncertain. The Department of Justice (DOJ) recently threatened criminal prosecution for SIF operators, medical personnel, …

Weed Whacking Through The Tenth Amendment: Navigating A Trump Administration Threat To Withhold Funding From Marijuana-Friendly States, Arlen Gharibian

Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

The Trump administration has taken a firm stance against marijuana legalization at the state level. While an official federal policy is still pending, this Article focuses on whether the Trump administration’s threats to preventCalifornia from pursuing its duly enacted marijuana legalization law violates the Tenth Amendment. This Article then addresses how the federal government could achieve its goal while remaining within the bounds of the Constitution.

Living, Aging, And Dying In Healthy And Just Societies: Life Lessons From My Father, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

My father passed away at 102 years old. He lived, aged, and died well. But that is rare in the United States and globally. The World Health Organization defines palliative care “throughout the life course” as improving quality of life for patients and families and relieving pain and suffering, while paying special attention to physical, psychosocial, and spiritual functioning. That’s the global vision, but then there’s the reality. Palliative care, in practice, has been little more than pain relief at life’s end—and in much of the world, not even that.

We need to reimagine palliation, embracing a communal or relational …

Legal Discrimination Against Organ Transplant Candidates: Medicinal Marijuana And The Double-Edged Sword, 52 Uic J. Marshall L. Rev. 859 (2019), Kyle Jorgensen

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Acting Differently: How Science On The Social Brain Can Inform Antidiscrimination Law, Susan Carle

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Legal scholars are becoming increasingly interested in how the literature on implicit bias helps explain illegal discrimination. However, these scholars have not yet mined all of the insights that science on the social brain can offer antidiscrimination law. That science, which researchers refer to as social neuroscience, involves a broadly interdisciplinary approach anchored in experimental natural science methodologies. Social neuroscience shows that the brain tends to evaluate others by distinguishing between "us" versus "them" on the basis of often insignificant characteristics, such as how people dress, sing, joke, or otherwise behave. Subtle behavioral markers signal social identity and group membership, …

Constitutional Cohesion And The Right To Public Health, James G. Hodge, Daniel G. Aaron, Haley R. Auger, Ashley Cheff, Joseph Daval

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Despite years of significant legal improvements stemming from a renaissance in public health law, Americans still face major challenges and barriers in assuring their communal health. Reversals of legal reforms coupled with maligned policies and chronic underfunding contribute to diminished public health outcomes. Underlying preventable morbidity and mortality nationally are realities of our existing constitutional infrastructure. In essence, there is no general obligation of government to protect or promote the public’s health. Under principles of “constitutional cohesion,” structural facets and rights-based principles interwoven within the Constitution protect individuals and groups from governmental vices (i.e., oppression, overreaching, tyranny, and malfeasance). Structural …

"You Have The Data"...The Writ Of Habeas Data And Other Data Protection Rights: Is The United States Falling Behind?, Sarah L. Lode

Indiana Law Journal

In Part I of this Note, I will discuss the writ of habeas data that has been developed primarily, but not exclusively, in Latin American countries. I will discuss the intricacies of the writ, how it evolved, and how it is applied today. Using Argentina as an example, I will discuss how the writ would be used by an Argentine citizen to protect her personal data. Part II summarizes the previously employed data protection scheme in the European Union, the Data Protection Directive (“the Directive”), and will also discuss the new EU data protection regulation, the General Data Protection Regulation …

Controlling Biogenic Volatile Organic Compounds For Air Quality, Brian Sawers

Indiana Law Journal

This Article tells a story that is true but seems completely wrong: Trees can make air pollution worse. Smog and ground-level ozone require two chemical ingredients to form: nitrous oxides (NOx) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). On a warm, sunny day, these two precursors combine to form smog and ground-level ozone, a pollutant. While NOx are pollutants that are largely human-created, VOCs can originate with plants. In fact, emissions of just one type of VOC from trees exceed all human-caused emissions.

This Article presents new research on the impact of plants, especially trees, on air quality. The science is complicated …

Abortion Talk, Clare Huntington

Michigan Law Review

Review of Carol Sanger's About Abortion: Terminating Pregnancy in Twenty-First-Century America.

The Gender Injustice Of Abortion Laws, Joanna Erdman

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This commentary is a response to Katarzyna Sękowska-Kozłowska’s article on the treatment of criminal abortion laws as a form of sex discrimination under international human rights law through a study of the communications, Mellet v. Ireland and Whelan v. Ireland. The commentary offers a reading of these communications, and specifically the sex discrimination analysis premised on inequalities of treatment among women, as an engagement with the structural discrimination that characterises abortion laws, and asa radical vision for gender justice under international human rights law.

Dr. Tele-Corporation: Bridging The Access-To-Care Gap, Nader Amer

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

The United States is currently confronting an access-to-healthcare crisis, which rural regions are experiencing at a disproportionate rate. Many commentators have touted telemedicine as a solution for the access-to-care issue. Telemedicine uses video and telecommunication technology to allow physicians to treat patients from distant locations and thus facilitates a more equal distribution of physicians throughout the United States.

Although the telemedicine industry is quickly growing, the corporate practice of medicine doctrine impedes the industry’s expansion and consequently obstructs a viable solution to the access-to-care crisis. Generally, the corporate practice of medicine doctrine prohibits corporations and limited liability companies from employing …

About A Revolution: Toward Integrated Treatment In Drug And Mental Health Courts, Sara Gordon

Scholarly Works

This Article examines specialty courts, including drug, alcohol, and mental health courts, which proponents claim created a revolution in criminal justice. Defendants whose underlying crime is the result of a substance use disorder or a mental health disorder can choose to be diverted into a specialty court, where they receive treatment instead of punishment. Many of these individuals, however, do not just suffer from a substance use disorder or a mental health disorder; instead, many have a “co-occurring disorder.” Approximately 8.9 million American adults have co-occurring mental health and substance use disorders, and almost half of individuals who meet diagnostic …

Health Care Costs And The Arc Of Innovation, Neel U. Sukhatme, Maxwell Gregg Bloche

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Health care costs continue their inexorable rise, threatening America’s long-term fiscal stability, competitiveness, and standard of living. Over the past half-century, efforts to rein in spending have uniformly failed. In this Article, we explain why, breaking with standard accounts of regulatory and market dysfunction. We point instead to the nexus of economics, mutual empathy, and social expectations that drives medical innovation and locks in low-value technologies. We show how law reflects and reinforces this nexus and how and why health-policy-makers avert their gaze.

Next, we propose to circumvent these barriers instead of surmounting them. Rather than targeting today’s excessive spending, …

Predetermined? The Prospect Of Social Determinant-Based Section 1115 Waivers After Stewart V. Azar, Griffin Schoenbaum

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Section 1115 of the Social Security Act allows the Secretary of Health and Human Services (the “Secretary”) to waive some of Medicaid’s requirements so states can enact “demonstration projects.” A demonstration project is an experiment a state can conduct by modifying aspects of its Medicaid program. To waive Medicaid’s requirements for this purpose, the Secretary must determine that the proposed demonstration project will likely assist in promoting Medicaid’s objectives.

Using this standard, President Trump’s Secretary has approved waiver requests to enact demonstration projects that contain “community engagement” requirements. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia has heard each …

Trump’S Angry White Women: Motherhood, Nationalism, And Abortion, Yvonne F. Lindgren

Faculty Works

A majority of white women — fifty-two percent — voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. White working-class women supported Trump in even greater numbers: sixty-one percent of white women without college degrees voted for Trump. This result seems remarkable considering Trump’s derogatory statements about women and his staunch opposition to legal access to abortion. Why did white women, especially those most likely to need access to reproductive healthcare—poor and working-class women — vote heavily against their own interests to embrace a candidate who called for punishing women who access abortion? Much recent commentary has considered this question …

Contemporary Aspects Of Female Genital Mutilation Prohibitions In The United States, Limor Ezioni

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

Big Waiver Under Statutory Sabotage, Elizabeth Mccuskey

Faculty Scholarship

The Affordable Care Act's State Innovation waiver allows federal agencies to suspend the most controversial parts of the statute for states to pursue alternative paths, while keeping the federal funding provided by the statute. This "big waiver" provision has the potential to enable states to pursue transformative health reforms, while preserving the affordability and universal coverage aims of the federal statute. Big waivers like this one carry theoretical promise, which largely depends on the strength of the federal statute's baseline infrastructure. This Essay considers early implementation of the State Innovation waiver as a test for big waiver theory - and …

Ethical Cannabis Lawyering In California, Francis J. Mootz Iii

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

Cannabis has a long history in the United States. Originally, doctors and pharmacists used cannabis for a variety of purposes. After the Mexican Revolution led to widespread migration from Mexico to the United States, many Americans responded by associating this influx of foreigners with the use of cannabis, and thereby racializing and stigmatizing the drug. After the collapse of prohibition, the federal government repurposed its enormous enforcement bureaucracy to address the perceived problem of cannabis, despite the opposition of the American Medical Association to this new prohibition. Ultimately, both the states and the federal government classified cannabis as a dangerous …

Childhood Obesity And Positive Obligations: A Child Rights-Based Approach, Benedetta Faedi Duramy

Seattle University Law Review

Childhood obesity is one of the most serious current public health challenges. Its prevalence has increased at an alarming rate. The World Health Organization estimated that in 2016 the global number of overweight children under the age of five was over 41 million. Although there is widespread concern about the rising rates of childhood obesity, there is not as much consensus on how to address the problem. Obesity has been mostly considered either a matter of personal responsibility or of parental responsibility when it concerns children. Inadequate attention has been given instead to the obligations borne by States to prevent …

The Overdose/Homicide Epidemic, Valena E. Beety

Georgia State University Law Review

This Article explores the lack of regulation of coroners, concerns within the forensic science community on the reliability of coroner determinations, and ultimately, how elected laypeople serving as coroners may influence the rise in drug-induced homicide prosecutions in the midst of the opioid epidemic.

This Article proposes that the manner of death determination contributes to overdoses being differently prosecuted; that coroners in rural counties are more likely to determine the manner of death for an illicit substance overdose is homicide; and that coroners are provided with insufficient training on interacting with the criminal justice system, particularly on overdose deaths. Death …