Georgetown University Law Center

About: Georgetown University Law Center is a based out in . It is known for research contribution in the topics: Supreme court & Global health. The organization has 585 authors who have published 2488 publications receiving 36650 citations. The organization is also known as: Georgetown Law & GULC.

Murdering the Spirit: Racism, Rights, and Commerce

Abstract: Patricia Williams' The Alchemy of Race and Rights: The Diary of a Law Professor, is an eloquent, profoundly original, and often brilliant collection of interdisciplinary essays and stories concerning the impact of racism and poverty on the human spirit; the historic and continuing role of law and legal institutions in defining, facilitating, and perpetuating those harms; and the possibilities and dangers imminent in the attempt to use law to effect a remedy for them. This is a book that we should celebrate: it reminds us that books are occasionally very, very important, that reading can be transformative, and that writing sometimes can be and should always strive to be a moral act of the highest order. In the first Part of this review, I will briefly discuss just three of the substantive and disciplinary accomplishments of this book, and then I will present two possible objections (and possible responses) to some of the implicit and explicit theses the book defends. It is my view, however, that the greatness of this book lies neither in its disciplinary breakthroughs nor in its explicit analysis of race and law. The book's importance and uniqueness is in what it shows about the nature of private racism, which Williams provocatively calls a form of "spirit-murder" – the generic "disregard for others whose lives qualitatively depend on our regard." Much of Williams' book is given over to rich personal depictions of both the nature of the act of spirit murder thus defined and, more importantly, perhaps, the nature of the injury its victims experience. Thus, in the second and major Part of this review, I will try to describe "spirit-murder," the depiction of which I take to be the heart of Williams' contribution to our modem understanding of race relations in this country. In the concluding Part, I will review the two possible legal paths toward compensating or correcting the multiple injuries of spirit-murder that Williams describes. The first, toward which Williams is deeply ambivalent, consists in the related worlds of commerce and contract. If spirit-murder is, in its legal sense, that injury that results from being the "object" rather than the subject of property, contract, and commerce – a legal "disregard" felt most dramatically by the slave – then inclusion as subjects rather than objects in the world of commerce might be thought an adequate remedy. The promise, however, that the injuries sustained from the legacy of slavery would be eradicated simply through the legally mandated inclusion of African Americans in this country's commerce has turned out to be at least somewhat illusory. Consequently, both commerce and the law of commercial relations play a pivotal but deeply ambiguous role in Williams' book. The second route of recovery, about which Williams is less equivocal and far more hopeful, is through an expansive and avowedly utopian conception of rights.

Legislating and litigating health care rights around the world.

Abstract: his special edition of the Journal explores the establishment of health care rights through T legislation and litigation in a range of jurisdictions across the globe. The emphasis in this edition is on rights to publiclyfunded health care and the struggle to determine a just allocation of public resources in countries as diverse as New Zealand, Israel, Canada, South Africa, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Much of the emphasis in this collection is on rationing health care in publicly-funded systems. There are also insights for health care systems with more private funding, such as the United States system, where both private and public payers are increasingly looking to ways to legitimately ration or prioritize access to health care even if it is only for the purpose of expanding profit margins. The contributors to this volume repeatedly address the difficulty of determining how much money the public sector receives. Carmel Shalev and David Chinitz elegantly reference this point, quoting Paul Simon: “one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor.” A basic problem is that those whose needs are met in the private sector may be less willing through tax dollars or service fees to help fund treatment for those in the public sector who are most in need. On the upside, limited availability of public dollars may lead to more efficient use and rigorous oversight of public dollars. Studies consistently show, for example, that the only real difference in terms between Canada and the United States is the amount of money spent, and that there is little or no overall difference in health care outcomes. More money, particularly more private dollars, doesn’t inevitably lead to overall better health outcomes or even necessarily more consumption of health services. The downside is that at times the public system can be cut too close to the bone, resulting in concerns about waiting for access to treatment and leading to dissatisfaction with the public system and calls for increased privatization. Concerns about publicly-funded health care have resulted in multiple efforts to establish rights to health care. In some jurisdictions including Norway, Israel, and the Netherlands such substantive rights have been established through legislation and, in the case of South Africa, enshrined in the constitution. Other countries, such as New Zealand, have not recognized substantive rights but rather procedural rights: the rights to informed consent, confidentiality, to be treated with dignity, and the like. In the United States, concerns about rationing on the part of private managed care insurers have lead states to implement legislation designed to protect rights of those with private insurance and limit rationing measures on the part of managed care insurers. Concerns about the limits and deficiencies of publicly-funded health care have also resulted in increased litigation, as we see in almost all of the jurisdictions discussed by the various contributors to this journal. For example, in the recent case of Chaoulli v. Quebec (Attorney General)’ the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that there is a constitutional right to purchase private health insurance

Public Health Regulation: A Systematic Evaluation

Abstract: Public health interventions should be justified because they intrude on individual rights and incur economic costs. Coercive interventions can be justified only in three cases: to avert a risk of serious harm to other persons, to protect the welfare of incompetent persons, and, most controversially, to prevent a risk to the person herself. This chapter proposes a systematic evaluation of public health regulation. The article recommends that public health authorities should bear the burden of justification and, therefore, should demonstrate: (1) significant risk based on scientific evidence; (2) the intervention's effectiveness by showing a close fit between means and ends; (3) economic costs are reasonable; (4) human rights burdens are reasonable; and (5) benefits, costs, and burdens are fairly distributed. This series of articles has sought to provide a fuller understanding of the varied ways in which law can advance the public's health. Public health law should be seen broadly as the government's power and responsibility to assure the conditions for the population's health. As such public health law has transcending importance in how we think about government, politics, and policy.

Summary of the 2015 University of Michigan Sport Concussion Summit

Abstract: Discussions surrounding concussion have made their way into the public sphere over the previous decade with media attention and coverage of the injury fueling public debate. These conversations have devolved into discussions on banning contact and collision sports and raised legal questions surrounding injury management. Questions raised about concussion eclipse what science can answer, but the University of Michigan Injury Center (MI, USA) hosted a Concussion Summit in September 2015 as a means to condense, solidify and disseminate what is currently known on the topic. Areas for discussion included concussion incidence and prevention, diagnosis and management, legislation and education, legal and social aspects and future directions. A summary of those presentations are included within.

Property and the Construction of the Information Economy: A Neo-Polanyian Ontology

Abstract: This chapter considers the changing roles and forms of information property within the political economy of informational capitalism. I begin with an overview of the principal methods used in law and in media and communications studies, respectively, to study information property, considering both what each disciplinary cluster traditionally has emphasized and newer, hybrid directions. Next, I develop a three-part framework for analyzing information property as a set of emergent institutional formations that both work to produce and are themselves produced by other evolving political-economic arrangements. The framework considers patterns of change in existing legal institutions for intellectual property, the ongoing dematerialization and datafication of both traditional and new inputs to economic production, and the emerging logics of economic organization within which information resources (and property rights) are mobilized. Finally, I consider the implications of that framing for two very different contemporary information property projects, one relating to data flows within platform-based business models and the other to information commons.