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.

Reforming federal public health powers: Responding to national and global threats

Abstract: On January 19, 2017, the day before President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a final rule on communicable diseases.1 The new rule enhances federal powers to detect, test, apprehend, quarantine, and isolate international and domestic travelers while expanding due process safeguards. Although public health powers should be grounded in science, they also invoke fundamental values of personal liberty and privacy. A decade-long process of modernizing federal rules has been mired in controversy.

Imagining Global Health with Justice: Transformative Ideas for Health and Wellbeing While Leaving No One Behind

Abstract: The disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on communities of color in the United States and immense vulnerabilities in lower-income countries has revealed a global health reality that is often overshadowed by decades of progress in overall global health, with new lows in child and maternal deaths every year, more people with HIV receiving access to lifesaving anti-retroviral therapy, and rising life expectancies. That reality is one of vast national and global inequalities, with the lived experiences of members of marginalized populations far removed from laudatory health headlines. Here, we propose an ambitious agenda to bridge the gap between progress in global health and the realities of vast swaths of the world’s people. These proposals could comprise part of a new post-COVID-19 global health architecture to prepare the world for the next pandemic and protect even the poorest people in the poorest countries. We offer three ideas that, collectively, would span from international law to domestic law and policy to grassroots empowerment: a Framework Convention on Global Health, health equity programs of action, and a Right to Health Capacity Fund. A Framework Convention on Global Health would be a global treaty based in the right to health and aimed at national and global health equity, creating a missing regime of accountability for the right to health. It would take the right to health to the next level, bringing specificity to presently vague human rights standards and providing concrete tools to achieve them. Health equity programs of action would be systemic, systematic, and inclusive approaches to address health inequities that each marginalized population experiences, across the determinants of health. And a Right to Health Capacity Fund would empower right to health advocacy and advance equity, accountability, and participation by providing grants to civil society organizations advocating for the right to health and by supporting accountability and participation mechanisms. If brought to fruition, these proposals, which would interact with and reinforce with one another, would have a transformative impact on global health, greatly reducing health inequities – leaving no one behind in health in both ordinary and extraordinary times.

Compromise, Negotiation, and Morality

Abstract: Every once in a while an author publishes a book so important that it helps clarify fundamental concepts and thinking processes and illuminates the tragedies and hopes of the human condition. Avishai Margalit’s new book On Compromise and Rotten Compromises is such a book. It not only has important implications for political and moral philosophers, historians, and political scientists, it is must reading for all theorists and practitioners of our art and science of negotiation. In this book,Margalit provides negotiators with a clearer moral map on which to chart the importance and limits of the work we do when we negotiate for matters as important as peace and justice. Margalit rigorously explores the ethics (between those with “thick relations,” such as families, tribes, and friends) and the morality (between those with “thinner” relations — the rest of humanity) of negotiations in the context of “macronegotiations,” which are those involving states and collectivities. Margalit’s key question is: when should a compromise be absolutely morally prohibited? Which compromises are truly “rotten compromises”?

The Case for Congressional Regulatory Review

Abstract: The executive and legislative branches of government oversee the modern administrative state. Presidents have a duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” But Congress is entitled to regulate the regulators no less than the president; after all, Congress exercises its enumerated powers to create and fund domestic regulatory agencies. Thus, equipped with overlapping authorities, the elected branches of government historically have competed for the reins of administrative policy-making. Such competition represents a constitutionally healthy manifestation of dueling institutional “ambitions.” At present, however, the contest between the political branches is dangerously out of balance. Since Richard Nixon, presidents have increased control over the administrative state through a process known as “White House regulatory review.” Presidents developed this powerful management tool unilaterally, and today, these functions are performed out of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Congress, however, hasn’t kept pace. Not only has the legislature failed to create an equivalent of White House regulatory review, but the overall quality of oversight in Congress has declined as power has centralized in leadership and away from committees in both the House and Senate. The result is that the president calls the shots on the administrative state while Congress sits on the bench. Through its ever‐​tightening grip over the administrative state, the presidency has accumulated a constitutionally worrisome concentration of power. To remedy this alarming imbalance, this paper proposes the creation of a congressional capacity to evaluate administrative action. Because regulatory review is values driven, the only feasible institutional design is to give each party caucus in Congress its own ability to vet administrative action.

Balancing Communal Goods and Personal Privacy Under a National Health Informational Privacy Rule

Abstract: The newly-introduced Standards for Privacy of Individually Identifiable Health Information represent the first systematic national privacy protections of health information. Flowing from a Congressional mandate in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), the regulations protect the privacy of individually-identifiable health records in any form (including electronic, paper and oral) through disclosure and use limitations, fair information practices, and privacy and security policies that apply to covered entities (meaning health providers, health insurance plans and health care clearinghouses) and their business associates. Privacy safeguards are needed because of the personal nature of health data, the rapid shift from paper to electronic records, and actual and perceived risks of unwarranted disclosures. Existing health information privacy legal protections at the federal and state levels are fragmented, inconsistent, and variable. The new standards endeavor to protect patient privacy by limiting disclosures of individually-identifiable medical information (or protected health information (PHI)). Disclosure and use of PHI can only occur upon patient consent, subject to several exceptions outside the health care transaction setting. The regulations also implement fair information practices, which have long been a feature of existing federal laws. Fair information practices allow patients to (1) inspect and amend their records, (2) receive notice of covered entities privacy practices and potential uses and disclosures of health information, and (3) request confidential communications and an accounting of actual disclosures. Through the regulations, HHS attempts to protect individual privacy while recognizing legitimate needs for such data to process health claims and deliver medical care as well as provide for communal goods (including public health and health research). Many of these provisions leave significant gaps in privacy protection. At times the regulations promote inappropriate trade-offs between the public welfare and individual privacy. The regulations inadequately protect privacy in certain contexts, including consent requirements for use and disclosure of PHI for health care purposes and some fair information practices provisions. In contrast, the regulations sometimes fail to assure that information can be used when necessary for significant communal benefits or require substantial burdens on the health care industry without providing meaningful protection for patients.