Health Law and Policy Commons^™

First Do No Harm: Protecting Patients Through Immunizing Health Care Workers, Rene F. Najera, Dorit R. Reiss

Health Matrix: The Journal of Law-Medicine

The article discusses the how immunizing health care worker can help protecting vulnerable patients and mandatory vaccination of health care workers in New Jersey (Valent v. Board of Review, Department of Labor).

Human Trafficking: How A Joint Task Force Between Health Care Providers And Law Enforcement Can Assist With Identifying Victims And Prosecuting Traffickers, Megan Helton

Health Matrix: The Journal of Law-Medicine

The article discusses how a joint task force between health care providers and law enforcement can assist with identifying victims and prosecuting traffickers in the U.S. Topics discussed include legislation criminalizing human trafficking; laws protecting victims of human trafficking; and ways to combat human trafficking in the United States.

Litigating Intraoperative Neuromonitoring (Iom), Michael Brook, Kary Irle

University of Baltimore Law Review

Statistics regarding surgical medical malpractice are staggering. The annual cost of the medical malpractice liability system has been estimated to be $55.6 billion-2.4% of the total healthcare system.' The median award for plaintiffs in actions involving spinal cords is $2.9 million, and the median value for settlements is $1.45 million. A neurosurgeon will spend approximately eleven years of his or her career with outstanding malpractice claims.

Intraoperative neuromonitoring (IOM), also known as surgical neurophysiology, is hardly a novel medical technology. In fact, it has been used in the operating room for over half a century. IOM provides real-time monitoring of …

Gambling Disorder, Vulnerability, And The Law: Mapping The Field, Stacey A. Tovino

Faculty Articles

This Article seeks to descriptively map the sub-field of gambling disorder and the law and ask whether individuals with gambling disorder are vulnerable under the law. Like other scholarship that descriptively maps ethical, legal, and social implications of lesser known conditions and developments, this Article seeks to describe the treatment of individuals with gambling disorder in a variety of illustrative, but not exhaustive, legal contexts, to identify the limited scholarship assessing the application of the law to individuals with gambling disorder, and to invite members of the health law academy to bring their significant expertise to bear on these issues …

Collecting New Data On Disability Health Inequities, Elizabeth Pendo

All Faculty Scholarship

Prior to the Affordable Care Act, disability was marginalized in data collection efforts, limiting our ability to understand and address significant health inequities experienced by millions of Americans. Now, for the first time, we can use these tools to collect valuable new data on the nature and extent of health inequities experienced by people with disabilities across the country.

This article argues that standardized health collection data is critical to health equity, and because of the ACA’s groundbreaking requirements for data collection of disability status and treatment of patients with disabilities, we now have the potential to identify, track, and …

Missing The “Target”: Preventing The Unjust Inclusion Of Vulnerable Children For Medical Research Studies, Ruqaiijah A. Yearby

All Faculty Scholarship

Nearly everyone has experienced a burn and the resulting pain. Now imagine that you suffer a third-degree radiation burn that injures all the layers of your skin as well as the tissue, causing you extreme pain. . The burn turns your skin white, cherry red, or black and may produce blisters that are dry, hard, and leathery-looking. The burn can also be seen on the surface of your lungs and gastrointestinal tract. If the burn is big enough you will need skin grafts and surgery to replace the skin and tissue that will never grow back, as well as treatment …

Missing The 'Target': Preventing The Unjust Inclusion Of Vulnerable Children For Medical Research Studies, Ruqaiijah Yearby

All Faculty Scholarship

The central purpose of medical research on children is to generate new knowledge that can improve children’s health, subject to ethical standards that promote justice. Incorporated in U.S. law, international law, and European Union law, the Justice Principle prohibits targeting in medical research, which is the selection of research subjects because of their manipulability and compromised position, rather than for reasons directly related to the problem being studied. Unfortunately, medical research studies involving children have too often violated the Justice Principle, by targeting children in a compromised position due to their health status and vulnerable to manipulability because of their …

Imagining Global Health With Justice, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article offers a way to achieve global health with justice as a global health imperative. It is possible to have global health without justice, meaning that improvements in health outcomes could be achieved, but without a fair distribution of the benefits of good health. It is also possible to have justice without global health, where health outcomes are evenly distributed across the population but overall health is not improved. With this understanding, this article challenges current ways of understanding global health, and argues that absolute reductions in morbidity and premature mortality are not robust indicators of success in the …

Race Based Medicine, Color Blind Disease: How Racial Preferences In Violation Of The 14th Amendment Are Killing Us All, Ruqaiijah Yearby

All Faculty Scholarship

Disease is color blind, but medicine is not. For example, sickle cell disease is often discussed in terms of a Black disease; however, people of all different races suffer from sickle cell. Moreover, sickle cell is found in a number of places that have little to no Blacks, such as Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burma, and Honduras. Nevertheless, health care providers often provide people of different races different levels of care justifying their disparate treatment based on scientific claims. However, not only are these scientific claims baseless, but also the explicit use of race to determine what medical treatment is provided patients …

The Health Exception, Monica E. Eppinger

All Faculty Scholarship

The abortion doctrine laid out in Roe v. Wade permits a procedure necessary to preserve the life or the health of the pregnant woman, setting out what has come to be called the “life exception” and the “health exception.” This Article investigates the background and antecedents of the health exception, identifying three periods of formation and change up to the drafting of the Model Penal Code in 1959. It argues that theories of health lie at the heart of legal doctrine, shaping common-law treatment of abortion and persisting in nineteenth- and twentieth-century statutes. This account reveals origins of a health …

Law In The Shadow Of Violence: Can Law Help To Improve Doctor-Patient Trust In China?, Benjamin L. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

Can law help to address the lack of trust in doctor-patient relationships in China? This essay examines the role that law, on the books and in practice, has played in the rise and resolution of patient-doctor disputes and conflict in China. Law has generally played a secondary role in medical disputes: most patient claims never make it to court, and there is little evidence that negotiated outcomes are influenced by legal standards. Yet a legal framework weighted in favor of hospitals and doctors almost certainly exacerbated doctor-patient conflict in the 2000s. Patients facing legal procedures and rules that appeared to …

Ps V Ontario: Rethinking The Role Of The Charter In Civil Commitment, Isabel Grant, Peter J. Carver

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

In PS v Ontario, the Ontario Court of Appeal held that section 7 of the Charter requires that persons who are civilly committed for six months or more must have access to meaningful review over the conditions of their detention. In this paper, the authors argue that the decision has broad implications for provincial civil commitment regimes across the country. In particular, the Court’s analogy to the Criminal Code Review Board jurisprudence opens the door to a fuller recognition of the profound deprivation of liberty involved in civil commitments. An expanded role for civil review tribunals may be required, including …

G2i Knowledge Brief: A Knowledge Brief Of The Macarthur Foundation Research Network On Law And Neuroscience, David L. Faigman, Anthony Wagner, Richard J. Bonnie, Bj Casey, Andre Davis, Morris B. Hoffman, Owen D. Jones, Read Montague, Stephen J. Morse, Marcus E. Raichle, Jennifer A. Richeson, Elizabeth S. Scott, Laurence Steinberg, Kim Taylor-Thompson, Gideon Yaffe

Faculty Scholarship

Courts are daily confronted with admissibility issues – such as in cases involving neuroscientific testimony – that sometimes involve both the existence of a general phenomenon (i.e., “G”) and the question of whether a particular case represents a specific instance of that general phenomenon (i.e., “i”).

Unfortunately, courts have yet to carefully consider the implications of “G2i” for their admissibility decisions. In some areas, courts limit an expert’s testimony to the general phenomenon. They insist that whether the case at hand is an instance of that phenomenon is exclusively a jury question, and thus not an appropriate subject of expert …

Firearm Legislation And Firearm Mortality In The Usa: A Cross-Sectional, State-Level Study, Bindu Kalesan, Matthew Mobily, Olivia Keiser, Jeffrey Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

In an effort to reduce firearm mortality rates in the USA, US states have enacted a range of firearm laws to either strengthen or deregulate the existing main federal gun control law, the Brady Law. We set out to determine the independent association of different firearm laws with overall firearm mortality, homicide firearm mortality, and suicide firearm mortality across all US states. We also projected the potential reduction of firearm mortality if the three most strongly associated firearm laws were enacted at the federal level.

Financial Implications Of The Medicaid Expansion For Academic Medical Centers, Madeleine Oritt

MPA/MPP/MPFM Capstone Projects

On March 23, 2010, President Obama signed into law the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), with the goal of reforming the United States health care system and providing insurance for millions of uninsured citizens and residents. One component of the legislation was the expansion of Medicaid eligibility, which would extend to include all individuals “under age 65 whose family income is at or below 138 percent of the federal poverty guidelines ($14,484 for an individual and $29,726 for a family of four in 2011)” (NCSL, 2015). This provision was challenged in the United States Supreme Court, which ruled …

When Fantasy Becomes Reality: Attempts To Regulate The Highly Unregulated Daily Fantasy Sports Industry., Garrett Greene

St. Mary's Law Journal

Legislation is beginning to creep into the once safeguard-devoid sphere of the daily fantasy sports industry. Daily fantasy sports are a subset of traditional season-long fantasy sports and are immensely lucrative, yet there are hardly any standard regulations. Ironically, the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) of 2006, which was used to outlaw online poker gambling, paved the way for daily fantasy sports, because it federally exempted fantasy sports from being classified as illegal sports gambling. The UIGEA further protects daily fantasy sports from the Professional and Amateur Sports Prohibition Act (PASPA) of 1992 which prohibits states from sponsoring sports …

Baptists, Bootleggers & Electronic Cigarettes, Jonathan H. Adler, Roger E. Meiners, Andrew P. Morriss, Bruce Yandle

Faculty Publications

Electronic cigarettes pose a competitive threat to the makers of cigarettes and other tobacco products, as well as to nicotine replacement therapies such as nicotine gum and patches. A common response to such a threat is support for government regulation to suppress competition. Predictably, cigarette manufacturers and other threatened producers, as well as the governments that earn revenue from tobacco taxes, are supporting greater regulation of electronic cigarettes that would replicate the cartel-supporting rules of the Master Settlement Agreement. These efforts are aided by anti-smoking organizations that would like to prevent the growth of demand for electronic cigarettes. This episode …

The Color Of Pain: Blacks And The U.S. Health Care System--Can The Affordable Care Act Help To Heal A History Of Injustice?, Part Ii, Jennifer M. Smith

Journal Publications

The state of Americans' health care has been troubling, especially before health care reform.The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is often touted as universal health care, and the initial intention was for the U.S. to have universal health care. However, with all of the compromises involved in its passage, the ACA resulted in comprehensive health insurance reform, significantly increasing the accessibility, affordability, and quality of health care for most, but not all, Americans. The ACA is a substantial step toward universal health care-a near-universal mandate-that may soon provide coverage to all Americans, and even include undocumented immigrants. Americans can find excellent …

From Rights To Dignity: Drawing Lessons From The Movements For Aid In Dying And Reproductive Rights, Yvonne F. Lindgren

Faculty Works

In Roe v. Wade the Supreme Court identified the abortion right as “inherently, and primarily, a medical decision” to be decided between doctors and their patients. Early abortion case law closely linked the right to the doctor-patient relationship and situated abortion within the context of healthcare. Over the last forty years, however, the abortion right has come to be viewed almost exclusively as a constitutional right of decision-making or “choice.” Under the Court’s current analysis, the abortion right is cabined exclusively as a constitutional right to decide to terminate a pregnancy and, as a result, the Court has upheld significant …

Are Corporate Wellness Programs Hazardous?, Case Western Reserve University School Of Law, Law-Medicine Center

Case Law-Med

• Law-Medicine Center Co-Directors participate in White House Precision Medicine Initiative
• Law-Med Center Associate Director named the law school’s first Associate Dean for Diversity
• Dual Degrees in health-related fields
• Markus Willoughby selected for ‘California Lawyer Attorney of the Year’ award
• Alumna brings health law expertise to the American Academy of Dermatology
• Students receive stipends for their health law summer internship programs
• Aging with a Plan receives national publicity
• Class of 2016 health law grad published in Journal of Medical Ethics 
• Faculty and Scholarly Updates
• Law professor submits amicus brief in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt