Medical Jurisprudence Commons^™

On Kamisar, Killing, And The Future Of Physician-Assisted Death, Norman L. Cantor

Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers

In a famous 1958 article, Yale Kamisar brilliantly examined the hazards of abuse and of slippery slope extensions that subsequently, for 46 years, served to thwart legalization of physician-assisted death (PAD). This paper shows that during the same period law and culture have effectively accepted a variety of ways for stricken people to hasten death, with physicians involved in diverse roles. Those ways include rejection of nutrition and hydration, terminal sedation, administration of risky analgesics, and withholding or withdrawal of medical life support.

If these existing lawful modes of hastening death were widely acknowledged, the pressure to legalize voluntary active …

Internet Pharmacies: Why State Regulatory Solutions Are Not Enough, Linda C. Fentiman

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Internet pharmacies are an economic and communications miracle--and a regulatory nightmare. It is estimated that Americans spent some $3.2 billion in 2003 on medications from the Internet, but Internet pharmacies permit consumers to evade long-standing regulatory protections, particularly those that rely on the oversight of drug prescribing and dispensing by licensed physicians and pharmacists.

Ancillary Joint Ventures And The Unanswered Questions After Revenue Ruling 2004-51, Gabriel O. Aitsebaomo

ExpressO

Ever since the Internal Revenue Service (the "Service") issued Revenue Ruling 98-15… in which it emphasized "control" as a critical factor in determining whether a tax-exempt hospital that enters into a whole-hospital joint venture with a for-profit entity would continue to maintain its tax-exemption, practitioners and scholars alike have sought guidance from the Service regarding whether such "control" would also be required of an exempt organization that enters into an "ancillary joint venture" with a for-profit entity. In response, the Service issued Revenue Ruling 2004-51 on May 6, 2004.

… In Revenue Ruling 2004-51, the Service enunciated that a tax-exempt …

Mental Disorder And The Civil/Criminal Distinction, Grant H. Morris

University of San Diego Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper Series

This essay, written as part of a symposium issue to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the University of San Diego Law School, discusses the evaporating distinction between sentence-serving convicts and mentally disordered nonconvicts who are involved in, or who were involved in, the criminal process–people we label as both bad and mad. By examining one Supreme Court case from each of the decades that follow the opening of the University of San Diego School of Law, the essay demonstrates how the promise that nonconvict mentally disordered persons would be treated equally with other civilly committed mental patients was made and …

Competency To Stand Trial On Trial, Grant H. Morris, Ansar M. Haroun, David Naimark

University of San Diego Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper Series

This Article considers the legal standards for the determination of competency to stand trial, and whether those standards are understood and applied by psychiatrists and psychologists in the forensic evaluations they perform and in the judgments they make–judgments that are routinely accepted by trial courts as their own judgments. The Article traces the historical development of the competency construct and the development of two competency standards. One standard, used today in eight states that contain 25% of the population of the United States, requires that the defendant be able to assist counsel in the conduct of a defense “in a …

The Alley Behind First Street, Northeast: Criminal Abortion In The Nation's Capital 1873-1973, Douglas R. Miller

ExpressO

The thirtieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade found our country no less divided over abortion than it was during the era of its prohibition. As the bitter struggle over judicial nominations throughout the present administration suggests, abortion’s future remains at the forefront of American political debate.

In their push for increased limitations, abortion opponents generally overlook the historical consequences of prohibition. Abortion rights proponents often invoke history in their opposition to new restrictions, but tend to do so superficially, and only in a manner that supports their position.

This article attempts a more complex study of criminal abortion’s legal and …

Making Lawyers Compete, Lester Brickman

Articles

The article argues that the market for contingent-fee-financed tort litigation is not price competitive, primarily due to uniform contingency fees charged by lawyers regardless of case-specific factors such as risk or effort required. This lack of competition leads to excessive costs for claimants and contributes to the expansion of tort liability. The author contends that the legal profession maintains this system through various barriers, including ethical rules and entry restrictions, which prevent competitive market forces from functioning effectively.

The Relation Between Autonomy-Based Rights And Profoundly Disabled Persons, Norman L. Cantor

Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers

“The Relation Between Autonomy-based Rights and Profoundly Mentally Disabled Persons” Competent persons have fundamental rights to decide about abortion, methods of contraception, and rejection of life-sustaining medical treatment. Profoundly disabled persons are so cognitively impaired that they cannot make their own serious medical decisions. Yet some courts suggest that the mentally impaired are entitled to “the same right” to choice regarding critical medical decisions as competent persons. This article discusses the puzzling question of how to relate autonomy-based rights to never-competent persons. It argues that while profoundly disabled persons cannot be entitled to make their own medical decisions, they have …

The Bane Of Surrogate Decision Making: Defining The Best Interests Of Never-Competent Persons, Norman L. Cantor

Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers

The medical fate of never-competent persons cannot be resolved according to the approach governing previously competent persons -- surrogate focus on self-determination via advance instructions or projections of what the now-incompetent person would want in the circumstances. For never-competent medical patients, the commonly stated approach to surrogate decision making is best interests of the incapacitated ward.

This article examines and questions the conventional wisdom regarding a "best interests of the patient" standard. When a parent is the surrogate decision maker, the medical course chosen need not be the best course, so long as it is a plausible medical option and …

Euthanasia In America - Past, Present, And Future: A Review Of A Merciful End And Forced Exit, Edward J. Larson

Michigan Law Review

Nearly 170 years ago, in the classic first volume of his Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville observed, "Scarcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved, sooner or later, into a judicial question." De Tocqueville viewed this as a peculiarly U.S. development. He attributed it to the authority of the judiciary in the United States to review governmental enactments and establish individual rights based on judicial interpretation of the federal and state constitution. "Whenever a law that the judge holds to be unconstitutional is invoked in a tribunal of the United States, he may …

Why Don't Doctors & Lawyers (Strangers In The Night) Get Their Act Together?, Frances H. Miller

Michigan Law Review

Health care in America is an expensive, complicated, inefficient, tangled mess - everybody says so. Patients decry its complexity, health care executives bemoan its lack of coherence, physicians plead for universal coverage to simplify their lives so they can just get on with taking care of patients, and everyone complains about health care costs. The best health care in the world is theoretically available here, but we deliver and pay for it in some of the world's worst ways. Occam's razor ("Among competing hypotheses, favor the simplest one") is of little help here. There are no simple hypotheses - everything …

The Cocaine Vaccine, Dru Stevenson

ExpressO

The controversial new cocaine vaccine (TA-CD) has the potential to be an extremely effective treatment tool for recovering addicts, but it also presents opportunities for non-therapeutic uses, such as preventing cocaine use in the first place. It is foreseeable that the cocaine vaccine could become a condition of parole or probation, or receiving welfare payments, or for employment in certain occupations. Universal vaccination is also a possibility but less likely for political reasons. This article investigates each of these areas of potential use. Any setting where mandatory drug testing is currently in place could become a venue for the vaccination. …

Patent Wars In The Valley Of The Shadow Of Death: The Pharmaceutical Industry, Ethics And Global Trade, Uche Ewelukwa

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

Assisted Reproduction In Germany And The United States: An Essay In Comparative Law And Bioethics , John A. Robertson

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

Gay And Lesbian Rights To Procreate And Access To Assisted Reproductive Technology, John A. Robertson

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

Medical Marijuana And Personal Autonomy, 37 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1253 (2004), Andrew J. Boyd

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Hippocrates To Hipaa: A Foundation For A Federal Physician-Patient Privilege, 77 Temp. L. Rev. 505 (2004), Ralph Ruebner, Leslie Ann Reis

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Good Enough To Use For Research, But Not Good Enough To Benefit From The Results Of That Research: Are The Clinical Hiv Vaccine Trials In Africa Unjust?, Ruqaiijah A. Yearby

All Faculty Scholarship

The epidemic of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) infection in Sub-Saharan Africa, the region most affected by the HIV pandemic and where HIV is the leading cause of death, is reaching insurmountable proportions. In fact, out of the 36.1 million HIV infections worldwide, 25.3 million, seventy percent, are in Sub-Saharan Africa. Additionally, of the more than 15,000 people who are infected with HIV every day, ninety-five percent of the cases are in populations that live in developing countries such as those located in Sub-Saharan Africa. Due to the significant number of Africans infected with HIV, many researchers and ethicists have …

When Vitalism Is Dead Wrong: The Discrimination Against And Torture Of Incompetent Patients By Compulsory Life- Sustaining Treatment, Alicia R. Ouellette

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

A Quantitative Methodology For Determining The Need For Exposure-Prompted Medical Monitoring, Christopher P. Guzelian, Bruce E. Hillner, Philip S. Guzelian

Indiana Law Journal

Some toxic exposures to drugs or other environmental chemicals may create an increased risk of future disease for which periodic preventive medical screening might be desirable. However, many of these risks, even if unacceptable as a matter of public health policy, might still not be significant enough for medical monitoring (periodic diagnostic screening for latent illnesses or medical conditions) to be an appropriate medical intervention. This somewhat unintuitive, but statistically certain, conclusion can be demonstrated in relatively simple mathematical terms. Accordingly, we introduce Bayes's Rule and decision analysis, a quantitative methodology commonly employed by medical practitioners. A review of current …

How A Drug Becomes ‘Ethnic’: Law, Commerce, And The Production Of Racial Categories In Medicine, Jonathan Kahn

Faculty Scholarship

A drug called BiDil is poised to become the first drug ever approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat heart failure in African Americans - and only African Americans. This article explores the story of BiDil and considers some of its broader implications for the use of racial categories in law, medicine, and science. It argues that BiDil is an ethnic drug today as much, if not more because of the interventions of law and commerce as because of any biomedical considerations. The article is, first, a retrospective analysis of how law, commerce, science, and medicine interacted …

Use And Disclosure Of Protected Health Information For Research Under The Hippa Privacy Rule, The: Unrealized Patient Autonomy And Burdensome Government Regulation, Stacey A. Tovino

Scholarly Works

This article offers a legal and ethical analysis of the requirements of federal privacy regulations (herein after the “Privacy Rules”) relating to the use and disclosure of individually identifiable health information for research activities. Section II of this article provides a legal summary of the Privacy Rules’ complex research provisions. Sections III and IV of this article analyze the Privacy Rules’ research provisions from a legal and ethical perspective. Specifically, Section III addresses whether the Privacy Rules promote autonomy by analyzing certain of the legal rights attributed to individuals who are the subjects of health information including: (1) the general …

Evidence-Based Medicine In The Law Beyond Clinical Practice Guidelines: What Effect Will Ebm Have On The Standard Of Care?, Carter L. Williams

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

In Defense Of The Professional Standard Of Care: A Response To Carter Williams On "Evidence-Based Medicine", Ann Maclean Massie

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

American Midwifery Litigation And State Legislative Preferences For Physician-Controlled Childbirth, Stacey A. Tovino

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The transition from lay midwife-assisted home births to physician-controlled hospital deliveries in the U.S. was driven by a complex interplay of professional competition, economic interests, and societal biases, which were reinforced by judicial deference to state legislative preferences favoring medical dominance over childbirth practices.

Organ Transplants Are Becoming A Possibility For Hiv Patients, Michelle Lammers

Public Interest Law Reporter

No abstract provided.

Steering And Rowing In Health Care: The Devolution Option?, Colleen Flood, Joanna Erdman, Duncan Sinclair

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Publicly funded health care systems are often the subject of heated policy debates. All too often (particularly in Canada), these debates focus on the prohibitive costs, the resultant taxation levels, and the questionable efficiency and outcomes associated with a publicly funded system. Moreover, the institutionalization of the system and the entrenchment of its many stakeholders make effecting change particularly difficult. In this article, the authors begin with an assessment of the drawbacks of the Canadian health care system in the federal-provincial context and its resulting gaps in governance (steering), in management (rowing), and in overall accountability (apart from that offered …

The Boundaries Of Medicare: Tensions In The Dual Role Of Ontario's Physician Services Review Committee, Colleen Flood, Joanna Erdman

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In this research, we describe and analyse the Physician Services Committee (PSC) in Ontario, focusing on its role in determining what physician services are publicly funded and what services are de-listed (i.e. no longer eligible for public funding). We explain how the PSC's role in determining the boundaries of Medicare is in tension with its role as a medium for labour relations between the government and the medical profession. We suggest that while the values of privacy, secrecy and a lack of transparency may enhance the PSC's fulfillment of its labour relations mandate, they impede the Committee's successful fulfillment of …

Politicizing The End Of Life: Lessons From The Schiavo Controversy, Barbara A. Noah

Faculty Scholarship

The case of Theresa Marie Schiavo raises challenging legal and ethical issues, although the events of the case are not entirely novel. It is a well-settled principle under Florida law that individuals have a right to refuse life-sustaining medical treatment. After years of litigation, numerous courts have confirmed that removal of life support is legally appropriate under the facts of this case. Nevertheless, six days after Theresa's feeding tube was removed, the Florida legislature
opted to intervene in the final judicial decision by granting the Governor the authority to overrule the court's decision and to order the tube reinserted. These …

On Kamisar, Killing, And The Future Of Physician-Assisted Death, Norman L. Cantor

Michigan Law Review

Tens - perhaps hundreds - of thousands of trees could have been spared over the last forty-five years had opponents of physician-assisted death only been content to let Yale Kamisar be their exclusive spokesperson. Their movement would have lost no significant substance or persuasive force, for Kamisar's 1958 article - Some Non-Religious Views Against Proposed 'Mercy-Killing' Legislation - presaged the shape and content of the subsequent forty-five year debate over legalizing physician-assisted death ("PAD" ). Kamisar's article preceded by years the development of a whole jurisprudence relating to the withholding/withdrawing of life-sustaining medical treatment ("LSMT") and the administration of pain-relief …