Medical Jurisprudence Commons^™

Instrumental And Transformative Medical Technology, Nicole Huberfeld Professor Of Law

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

This Article considers how medical technologies impact universality in health care. The universality principle, as embodied in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), eliminated widespread discriminatory practices and provided financial assistance to those otherwise unable to become insured--a democratizing federal act that was intended to stabilize health care policy nationwide. This Article posits that medical technology, as with all of medicine, can be universalizing or exclusionary and that this status roughly correlates to its being "instrumental technology" or "transformative technology." Instrumental technology acts as a tool of medicine and often serves an existing aspect of health care; in …

Medical Decision Making For Youth In The Foster Care System, 49 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1103 (2016), Zach Strassburger

UIC Law Review

Youth in the foster care system often have no one person who is clearly authorized to make medical decisions for them. From a caseworker insisting upon a vaccine to a birth parent refusing permission for psychotropic medication, the evidence supports the argument that who makes these decisions matters for children’s rights. The Author reviewed relevant laws and policies, surveyed stakeholders to understand actual practices, then interviewed a subset of these stakeholders to get further details about who decides what care a young person receives. This Article argues that policies should be nuanced but consistent, promoting birth parent involvement and family …

A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand: The Need To Federalize Surrogacy Contracts As A Result Of A Fragmented State System, 49 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1155 (2016), Brett Thomaston

UIC Law Review

This comment will explain the necessity for federal regulation of surrogacy contracts by analyzing the current state of surrogacy laws across the United States. This will be accomplished by examining the fragmented state system and how this largely ignored area of the law has been a feeding ground for widespread forum shopping and inconsistent results. This comment will then address the public policy reasons in support of enforcing these contracts. Next, this comment will examine the avenues of congressional power for regulating these types of contracts. Lastly, this comment will propose that the federal government implement legislation containing key language …

Use Of Facial Recognition Technology For Medical Purposes: Balancing Privacy With Innovation, Seema Mohapatra

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Religiously-Motivated Medical Neglect: A Response To Professors Levin, Jacobs, And Arora, Doriane Lambelet Coleman

Faculty Scholarship

This Response to Professors Levin, Jacobs, and Arora’s article To Accommodate or Not to Accommodate: (When) Should the State Regulate Religion to Protect the Rights of Children and Third Parties? focuses on their claim that the law governing religious exemptions to medical neglect is messy, unprincipled, and in need of reform, including because it violates the Establishment Clause. I disagree with this assessment and provide support for my position. Specifically, I summarize and assess the current state of this law and its foundation in the perennial tussle between parental rights and state authority to make decisions for and about the …

Regulating Identity: Medical Regulation As Social Control, Matt Lamkin

Articles, Chapters in Books and Other Contributions to Scholarly Works

New biomedical technologies offer growing opportunities not only to prevent and treat illnesses, but also to change how healthy people think, feel, behave, and appear to others. Controversies over these nontherapeutic practices are a pervasive feature of contemporary American culture, from students on "study drugs" and cops on steroids to skin-lightening by black celebrities and the over-prescription of antidepressants. Yet the diversity of these controversies often masks their common root-namely, disputes about the propriety of using medical technologies as tools for shaping one's identity.

Some observers believe these so-called "enhancement" practices threaten important values, offering unfair advantages to users and …

Puff, The Magic Dragon, And The Estate Planner, Gerry W. Beyer, Brooke Dacus

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

With the legalization of medical and recreational marijuana in almost half of the states, practitioners need to be aware of the interface between marijuana and estate planning. This Article provides a discussion of the major issues that arise in this context. After bringing readers current with the history of legalized marijuana, the Article focuses on how marijuana use may impact a user’s capacity to execute a will and other estate planning documents. The Article then examines other estate planning concerns such as will and trust provisions conditioning benefits on the non-use of “illegal drugs” and the impact of marijuana use …

The Risks Of Clouded Property Title For Cannabis Business Owners, Investors, And Creditors, Sean M. O'Connor, Jason Liu

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

This Article provides a brief primer on the surprising range of assets that the CSA forfeiture provisions govern for the state-legal cannabis businesses. It outlines these provisions for tangible as well as intangible property, with an emphasis on risks to state-legal cannabis businesses’ intellectual property and issued securities. We argue that these forfeiture risks create clouded title for all subject tangible and intangible property—not only for the state-legal businesses and their proprietors, but also for those businesses’ outside investors, creditors, and suppliers/contractors.

Do Black Lives Matter? Race As A Measure Of Injury In Tort Law, 18 Scholar: St. Mary's L. Rev. & Soc. Just. 41 (2016), Alberto Bernabe

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

Discussions of race-related issues are a constant in American society. Within the last year alone, there have been several high profile events that have prompted important debates about race. Most of the events attracting nationwide attention involved the conduct of law enforcement agents, including incidents in which unarmed black men died at the hands of police officers, peaceful protests that turned violent following the failure to indict the police officers involved in those cases and the use of excessive force on black teenagers attending social events and while at school. Other events included the racial identity controversy regarding a member …

The Execution Of An Arbitration Provision As A Condition Precedent To Medical Treatment: Legally Enforceable? Medically Ethical, 42 Mitchell Hamline L. Rev. 273 (2016), Marc Ginsberg

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

Is it reasonable for a physician to condition treatment upon the patient’s execution of an arbitration agreement? Is such an agreement enforceable? Is such an agreement medically ethical? This paper will address these topics (and others) in an effort to determine whether a treatment conditioned upon the execution of an arbitration agreement covering medical liability claims is consistent with, and should be a defensible component of the physician-patient relationship.

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.

Texas Advance Directives Act: Nearly A Model Dispute Resolution Mechanism For Intractable Medical Futility Conflicts, Thaddeus Pope

Faculty Scholarship

Increasingly, clinicians and commentators have been calling for the establishment of special adjudicatory dispute resolution mechanisms to resolve intractable medical futility disputes. As a leading model to follow, policymakers both around the United States and around the world have been looking to the conflict resolution provisions in the 1999 Texas Advance Directives Act (‘TADA’). In this article, I provide a complete and thorough review of the purpose, history, and operation of TADA. I conclude that TADA is a commendable attempt to balance the competing goals of efficiency and fairness in the resolution of these time-sensitive life-and-death conflicts. But TADA is …

Medical Malpractice Arbitration: Not Business As Usual, David Larson, David Dahl

Faculty Scholarship

There is an interesting exception to businesses’, employers’, and service providers’ seemingly universal embrace of arbitration processes, particularly mandatory pre-dispute arbitration. Although it may be difficult to believe given arbitration’s current popularity, not everyone requires his or her clients to sign mandatory pre-dispute arbitration agreements. In fact, some service providers prefer to avoid arbitration regardless of whether it is arranged pre- or post-dispute. So which merchants or service providers are choosing to forgo arbitration and, more importantly, why do they dislike arbitration? And do politics have anything to with their choices? Physicians are not, shall we say, the world’s greatest …

The Patenting Of Gene Based Diagnostic Assays In A Post Mayo And Myriad World, 16 J. Marshall Rev. Intell. Prop. L. 1 (2016), Michael Sanzo

UIC Review of Intellectual Property Law

Recent advances in biotechnology have given researchers the ability to comprehensively examine the genetic basis of disease in unprecedented ways and will undoubtedly result in many new and valuable gene based diagnostic assays in the near future. These advances came during a period of roughly thirty years during which the patent eligibility of such assays was essentially unquestioned. Then, beginning in 2010, the Supreme Court embarked on a series of decisions that will, in almost all cases, preclude the patenting of diagnostic assays that rely on genetic mutations or gene expression patterns. This article suggests that reason that the issue …

Live And Let Die: The Consequences Of Oklahoma’S Nondiscrimination In Treatment Act, Kendra Norman

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Can Dna Be Speech?, Jorge R. Roig

Scholarly Works

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. In this article we discuss myriad current and developing ways in which …

Abortion, Informed Consent, And Regulatory Spillover, Katherine A. Shaw, Alex Stein

Indiana Law Journal

The constitutional law of abortion stands on the untenable assumption that any state’s abortion regulations impact citizens of that state alone. On this understand-ing, the state’s boundaries demarcate the terrain on which women’s right to abortion clashes with state power to regulate that right.

This Article uncovers a previously unnoticed horizontal dimension of abortion regulation: the medical-malpractice penalties imposed upon doctors for failing to inform patients about abortion risks; the states’ power to define those risks, along with doctors’ informed-consent obligations and penalties; and, critically, the possi-bility that such standards might cross state lines. Planned Parenthood v. Casey and other …

Incumbent Landscapes, Disruptive Uses: Perspectives On Marijuana-Related Land Use Control, Donald J. Kochan

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

This Article is entirely agnostic with respect to the issue of whether we should or should not decriminalize, legalize, or otherwise increase legal tolerance for marijuana or any other drugs. One need not discuss these merits to process what property problems and possibilities might emerge when any of those law-relaxation efforts are enacted. But, as society seems to increasingly tolerate marijuana, we undoubtedly will encounter more pot-related property uses in need of analysis. We will be faced with both legal and political regulatory choices as we attempt to integrate the uses of properties associated with marijuana—for use, growing, cultivation, processing, …

Modernizing Informed Consent: Expanding The Boundaries Of Materiality, Nadia N. Sawicki

Faculty Publications & Other Works

Informed consent law’s emphasis on the disclosure of purely medical information – such as diagnosis, prognosis, and the risks and benefits of various treatment alternatives – does not accurately reflect modern understandings of how patients make medical decisions. Existing common law disclosure duties fail to capture a variety of non-medical factors relevant to patients, including information about the physician’s personal characteristics; the cost of treatment; the social implications of various health care interventions; and the legal consequences associated with diagnosis and treatment. Although there is a wealth of literature analyzing the merits of such disclosures in a few narrow contexts, …

Informed Consent As Compelled Professional Speech: Fictions, Facts, And Open Questions, Nadia N. Sawicki

Faculty Publications & Other Works

No abstract provided.