Medical Jurisprudence Commons^™

The Convention On The Elimination Of All Forms Of Discrimination Against Women: What Impact, If Any, Has It Had On Reproductive Health And Abortion Rights Around The World?, Casey Katz Pearlman

Cardozo International & Comparative Law Review

The note examines the impact of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) on reproductive rights and abortion laws, with a focus on Ireland's 2018 repeal of the Eighth Amendment, which legalized abortion. While CEDAW did not directly cause the repeal, it contributed to a broader international framework influencing the decision. The note also compares Ireland's experience with the United States, where CEDAW has not been ratified, and highlights the ongoing challenges in advancing reproductive rights globally.

The Current Application Of The Myriad And Mayo/Alice Rulings On Patent Eligibility: Inconsistent Results And Contradistinguishing Biotechnology Products, Skye Cho

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

The note examines the inconsistent application of the patent eligibility framework under Section 101 of the Patent Act, particularly in biotechnology. It argues that despite efforts by the USPTO to clarify the framework through memos and examples, courts have applied it inconsistently, leading to discrimination against biotechnology products. The analysis focuses on key Supreme Court decisions, such as Myriad Genetics and Mayo, and their impact on the patent eligibility of biotechnological innovations. The note highlights the need for clearer guidance to ensure consistent outcomes and fair treatment of biotechnological inventions.

Civil Rico: An Effective Deterrent To Fraudulent Asbestos Litigation?, Lester Brickman

Cardozo Law Review

In January 2014, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge George Hodges, presiding over the asbestos-related bankruptcy of Garlock Sealing Technologies, LLC, a manufacturer of gaskets containing asbestos, issued an order estimating Garlock's liability for pending and future mesothelioma cases. Judge Hodges, after hearing evidence discovered by Garlock in a sampling of settled cases, rejected using the usual bankruptcy court recourse to the debtor's historic settlement values as a valid basis for estimating Garlock's total future liability for asbestos-related injuries. He found that Garlock's prior mesothelioma settlements were not a reliable predictor of Garlock's liability because those settlements had been infected by misrepresentations by …

Familial Searching: How Implementing Minimum Safeguards Ensures Constitutionally-Permissible Use Of This Powerful Investigative Tool, Alexandra Nieto

Cardozo Law Review

This Note supports the adoption of Familial DNA Search Policies. by states that have not yet taken a position on the issue. Part I of this Note provides background on the role of Familial Searches in criminal investigations. This includes a discussion on the nature of Familial Searches, why they are useful, and the current state of the law. Part I also considers the different guidelines and protections in existing Familial Search Policies, as well as states' policies regulating their DNA databases. Part II discusses the Fourth Amendment and equal protection concerns implicated by Familial Searches and how a court …

Feigned Consensus: Usurping The Law In Shaken Baby Syndrome/Abusive Head Trauma Prosecutions, Keith A. Findlay, D. Michael Risinger, Patrick D. Barnes, Julie A. Mack, David A. Moran, Barry Scheck, Thomas L. Bohan

Articles

Few medico-legal matters have generated as much controversy-both in the medical literature and in the courtroom-as Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS), now known more broadly as Abusive Head Trauma (AHT). The controversies are of enormous significance in the law because child abuse pediatricians claim, on the basis of a few non-specific medical findings supported by a weak and methodologically flawed research base, to be able to "diagnose" child abuse, and thereby to provide all of the evidence necessary to satisfy all of the legal elements for criminal prosecution (or removal of children from their parents). It is a matter, therefore, in …

The Futility Of Futility: An Analysis Of The Charlie Gard Case Within The Framework Of U.S. Law, Elana Bengualid

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

How Subterranean Regulation Hinders Innovation In Assisted Reproductive Technology, Myrisha S. Lewis

Cardozo Law Review

Most scholars believe assisted reproductive technology is subject only to minimal regulation, especially by the federal government. This belief I contend, is wrong. In this Article, I examine agency documents, statements by officials, and letters that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has sent to physicians and researchers over the past fifteen years to reveal an overlooked regulatory program. The FDA has been targeting new forms of assisted reproductive technology that involve small genetic modifications (advanced assisted reproductive technologies or AARTs) through regulatory actions that receive little public, media, or scholarly attention. I term this method of regulation "subterranean …

Utilizing Adr As A Vehicle For Effective Communication And Success Of Payment In Urgent Care, Stephanie R. Goldberg

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

Section II of this Note provides background on urgent care and ADR. Section III will elaborate on current payment procedures and explain some of the pitfalls that create a need for a supplementary payment solution. Section IV lays out a four-step plan incorporating a logical progression of ADR techniques that would enable quality of care and ease and success of financial arrangements, and vastly improved patient-provider relations. The feasibility of this plan will be demonstrated through application of its steps to hypothetical examples, representative of various realistic patient experiences, in Section V. This plan is intended to aid the millions …

Incentivizing Cybersecurity Compliance In The New Digital Age: Prevalence Of Security Breaches Should Prompt Action By Congress And The Supreme Court, Cristiana Modesti

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Local Rules Revolution In Criminal Discovery, Daniel S. Mcconkie

Cardozo Law Review

Over the last few decades, federal district court judges throughout the country have used local rules to greatly expand pretrial criminal disclosure obligations, especially for prosecutors. These local criminal discovery rules both incentivize prosecutors to act as ministers of justice and empower judges to manage prosecutorial disclosures. This quiet revolution is now well underway, and the time has come to amend the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure to bring these innovations to all the districts.

Commentators have long recognized that neither Supreme Court precedent nor the Federal Rules effectively require prosecutors to provide the defense with enough discovery to properly …

Refusing To Treat Noncompliant Patients Is Bad Medicine, Jessica Mantel

Cardozo Law Review

Government health programs and private payors have adopted various reforms that fundamentally transform the physician-patient relationship. Public reporting on how well physicians perform on various quality and cost metrics, as well as payment reforms that link physicians' reimbursements to their performance on these metrics, incentivize physicians to improve the quality and efficiency of care they provide to patients. Less appreciated, however, is that these reforms also create strong incentives for physicians to reject patients who do not abide by their physician's medical opinion, including recommendations that the patient adopt healthier behaviors. These noncompliant patients increasingly willfind themselves rejected by physicians, …

Two-Stepping Around A Minor's Constitutional Right To Abortion, Wendy-Adele Humphrey

Cardozo Law Review

A woman's constitutional right to abortion was first generally established in the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, and a female minor has the same right to abortion. In the majority of states, however, pregnant young women are required to either notify their parents or to get their parents' consent before obtaining a safe, legal abortion. These parental involvement laws do not infringe on a minor's constitutional right to abortion if a proper 'judicial bypass" proceeding is available. But in Texas, the recently amended judicial bypass law imposes additional extensive-possibly unconstitutional-restrictions on a pregnant minor who seeks a …

Pre-Embryo Custody Battles: How Predisposition Contracts Could Be The Winning Solution, Ashley Alenick

Cardozo Law Review

The note examines the legal disputes arising from the disposition of frozen preembryos during divorce, highlighting the lack of consensus among U.S. courts in resolving such cases. It evaluates three legal approaches—constitutional analysis, contemporaneous agreement, and predisposition contracts—and argues that enforcing predisposition contracts, akin to prenuptial agreements, offers the most structured solution. However, the note emphasizes the need for procedural and substantive fairness in these contracts to ensure they are voluntary, fully disclosed, and do not unjustly prevent genetic parenthood.

Religion In The Time Of Measles: Prescriptions For Minimizing The Public Health Threats Associated With Religious Exemptions From Mandatory Vaccinations, Victor Diego Gonzalez

Cardozo Public Law, Policy & Ethics Journal

The note examines the legal and public health tensions surrounding childhood vaccination mandates, emphasizing the balance between individual rights and societal interests. It argues that while states have the authority to compel vaccinations under their police powers, the proliferation of nonmedical exemptions, particularly philosophical ones, undermines herd immunity and public health. The analysis advocates for stricter criteria for religious exemptions and educational measures to address vaccine hesitancy, while cautioning against eliminating religious exemptions entirely to avoid public backlash.

Conviction Integrity Units Revisited, Barry Scheck

Articles

“Conviction Integrity Unit” has become a brand name that has good public relations value for an elected official. But what does it really mean? Is it just a fashion accessory, a flashy but empty appellation intended to convey the idea that the office is extremely serious about correcting wrongful convictions and holding its own members accountable for errors or acts of misconduct, but really is not? Is conviction integrity nothing more than a passing fad, a nebulous slogan without real meaning that is good for propaganda purposes, but will not bring about any serious change in the way business is …

Informed Consent And Privacy Of Non-Identified Bio-Specimens And Estimated Data: Lessons From Iceland And The United States In An Era 1251 Of Computational Genomics, Donna M. Gitter

Cardozo Law Review

This Article analyzes issues of informed consent and patient autonomy raised by advances in bioinformatics and computational genomics. The Article describes the increasing use in biomedical research of estimated data. Researchers are able to use genetic and genealogical data from research subjects, who did agree to participate in genetic testing, in order to make educated guesses about the genetic profiles of their relatives who did not volunteer to participate. This estimated data can then be combined with health records of the non-volunteers in order to conduct computational genetic research, often termed "in silico" biology, without their informed consent. The Article …

Is It Time To Pay Attention? Critiquing The Cognitive Enhancement Drug Policies And Appeals Process In United States Collegiate Sports, David Swiedler

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

This Note examines PED use in college sports, focusing primarily on cognitive enhancing drugs as an example of a common lethal PED, and the current NCAA drug-testing regulations and disciplinary process to explore its efficiency and fairness. Then, the Note proposes changes to the NCAA protocol, specifically changes to the appeals process for student-athletes who fail drug tests for PED use and request a review of the disciplinary actions taken against them by the NCAA.

Utilizing Alternative Dispute Resolution To Foster Comprehensive Traumatic Brain Injury Research, Michael Meyers

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

ADR, and more specifically mediation, could increase funding towards TBI prevention and recovery research. Section II explores the TBI Reauthorization Act in an effort to highlight its many successes and some of its shortcomings. Following the assessment of the national legislation, it is appropriate to examine efforts being made at the state-level. Next, because professional and collegiate sports leagues control a great deal of revenue, it is important to assess the initiatives set forth through their official league policies and rules, public relations efforts, and scientific contributions. This calls for an extensive examination of the NFL, NHL, NCAA, and FIFA's …

Technological Opacity, Predictability, And Self-Driving Cars, Harry Surden, Mary-Anne Williams

Cardozo Law Review

Autonomous or "self-driving" cars are vehicles that drive themselves without human supervision or input. Because of safety benefits that they are expected to bring, autonomous vehicles are likely to become more common. Notably, for the first time, people will share a physical environment with computer-controlled machines that can both direct their own activities and that have considerable range of movement. This represents a distinct change from our current context. Today people share physical spaces either with machines that have free range of movement, but are controlled by people (e.g. automobiles) or with machines that are controlled by computers, but highly …

Securing Sequences: Ensuring Adequate Protections For Genetic Samples In The Age Of Big Data, Elizabeth R. Pike

Cardozo Law Review

Bulk collection of our personal data is increasingly common. Our internet browser history leads to personalized, targeted advertising; credit card companies aggregate billions of our collective transactions to gain insight into our spending patterns; and, as recently revealed, the National Security Agency engaged in the widespread collection of our telephone data without our knowledge or consent. But what if the data being collected, stored, shared, and used without our knowledge or consent is arguably the most personal of all data - our unique genetic sequence? In ways underreported and underexamined, the genetic information of nearly every American is likely to …

The Death Penalty Experiment: State-Sanctioned Laboratories Of Death, Steffi Yellin

Cardozo Public Law, Policy & Ethics Journal

No abstract provided.

My Body, My Property, My Baby? The Extension Of Property Rights To Sexual Reproductive Cells And Embryos, Chanel Vegh

Cardozo Public Law, Policy & Ethics Journal

No abstract provided.

Big Data, Patents, And The Future Of Medicine, W. Nicholson Price Ii

Cardozo Law Review

Big data has tremendous potential to improve health care. Unfortunately, intellectual property law isn't ready to support that leap. In the next wave of data-driven medicine, black-box medicine, researchers use sophisticated algorithms to examine huge troves of health data, finding complex, implicit relationships and making individualized assessments for patients. Black-box medicine offers potentially immense benefits, but also requires substantial high investment. Firms must develop new datasets, models, and validations, which are all nonrivalrous information goods with significant spillovers, requiring incentives for welfare-optimizing investment.

Current intellectual property law fails to provide adequate incentives for black-box medicine. The Supreme Court has sharply …

The Process Is Still The Punishment: Low-Level Arrests In The Broken Windows Era, Amanda Geller

Cardozo Law Review

Purpose: This Article examines the experience of contemporary arrestees in New York City to identify impositions they face in the processing of charges against them. In his seminal 1979 study The Process Is the Punishment, Malcolm Feeley documented severe administrative burdens faced by arrestees before judgment of guilt or innocence. I investigate the persistence of this dynamic in light of modern "proactive policing" tactics that bring millions of people into contact with the criminal justice system.

Methods: I match records of police encounters with court data on arrest processing to construct a unique dataset tracing more than 100,000 arrests …

From Patient Rights To Health Justice: Securing The Public's Interest In Affordable, High-Quality Health Care, Lindsay F. Wiley

Cardozo Law Review

Models emphasizing professional autonomy, patient rights, market power, and health consumerism are no longer adequate to address the increasingly social, collective nature of health law institutions, instruments, and norms. What is needed is a new model that expressly recognizes the public - alongside the patient, the provider, and the payer - as an important stakeholder and active participant in decisions about medical treatment, health care coverage, and allocation of scarce resources. In a previous article, the author looked to the environmental justice, reproductive justice, and food justice movements for inspiration in developing a "health justice" approach to eliminating social disparities …

Introduction, Forrest S. Mosten

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

This special edition of the Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution reflects the current exciting state of the Family Dispute Resolution field, inside and outside of the law school academy. The articles selected for this portion of the issue carry on the vibrant dialogue that took place at the Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution's Annual Symposium "All in the Family: Intimate Parties, Intimate Issues and ADR". This Symposium, hosted at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law on October 19, 2015, engaged scholars, practitioners, and students from across the country.

Technology, Gender And Fashion, Jeanne L. Schroeder

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Heads Up: The Concussion Crisis, Gabriel Blum

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The note examines the concussion crisis in sports, particularly focusing on the severe health risks associated with traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). It argues that while some view the issue as overblown, the growing evidence of debilitating short- and long-term health consequences for athletes, especially young ones, necessitates stronger legislative action. The note advocates for New York legislators to amend the Concussion Management and Awareness Act to include more robust protections and enforcement mechanisms to reduce concussion rates and improve care for affected athletes.

Can Dna Be Speech?, Jorge R. Roig

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

DNA is generally regarded as the basic building block of life itself. In the most fundamental sense, DNA is nothing more than a chemical compound, albeit a very complex and peculiar one. DNA is an information-carrying molecule. The specific sequence of base pairs contained in a DNA molecule carries with it genetic information and encodes for the creation of particular proteins. When taken as a whole, the DNA contained in a single human cell is a complete blueprint and instruction manual for the creation of that human being.

This Article discusses a myriad of current and developing ways in which …

A Hurdle Too High: The Unconstitutionality Of Mandatory Ultrasounds Under Casey's Undue Burden Standard, Katarzyna Kordas

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The article argues that mandatory ultrasound laws impose an undue burden on women seeking abortions, violating the constitutional standard established in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. These laws, often enacted to dissuade women from proceeding with abortions, are deemed medically unnecessary and unconstitutional as they obstruct women's reproductive rights.