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 & Public health. The organization has 585 authors who have published 2488 publications receiving 36650 citations. The organization is also known as: Georgetown Law & GULC.

Medical marijuana, compassionate use, and public policy: Expert opinion or vox populi?

Abstract: A recent article in the Hastings Center Report reviewed the Supreme Court's current (but undoubtedly not final) delineation of the boundaries of federal power as set forth by the Constitution's commerce clause. (1) The question before the Court was straightforward: Did federal authority asserted under the Controlled Substance Act of 1970 (CSA) trump California's legalization of "medical marijuana" when these plants were grown within the state and were not bought, sold, or transported into another state? (2) By a six to three vote, the Raich court held that the federal Drug Enforcement Administration could enforce the CSA against two individuals who were growing marijuana for their own medical use in full compliance with California's Compassionate Use Act (Proposition 215). At the same time, the Court's holding neither struck down Proposition 215 nor demanded that California bring criminal charges against its citizens who were using marijuana on the advice of their physicians. Unfortunately, the far more significant policy question raised by Proposition 215 was never adjudicated. In effect, Proposition 215 declared that some compounds used to treat disease could be evaluated and approved by a vote of the people rather than "by experts qualified by scientific training and experience," as mandated by the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. (3) But Proposition 215 was wrong as a matter of public policy. Anecdotes, Internet blogs, and advertisements do not provide a sound basis for assessing the safety and efficacy of pharmacologic agents. (4) "Medical marijuana" should be subjected to the same scientific scrutiny as any drug proposed for use in medical therapy, rather than made legal for medical use by popular will. In Raich and other cases (5) involving Proposition 215, marijuana's advocates presented this compound to the courts as a drug, a pharmaceutical agent efficacious in the treatment of serious and even life-threatening illnesses: Indeed, for Raich, 39, a mother of two teenagers who says she has been suffering from a litany of disabling ailments since she was a teenager herself, medical cannabis has worked where scores of other prescribed drugs have failed. ... It relieves pain, she said, from progressive scoliosis, endometriosis and tumors in her uterus. Raich even believes it has something to do with arresting the growth of an inoperable brain tumor. She is convinced that her use of medical marijuana, which began in 1997 after she had been using a wheelchair for two years, made her strong enough to stand up and learn to walk again. She said doctors could find no other explanation. (6) These extravagant claims notwithstanding, marijuana has been used as a therapeutic agent throughout history, as Mathew W. Grey noted in a 1996 review of the use of medical marijuana: Cannabis, more commonly referred to as marijuana, has a long history of medical use in this country and worldwide. Accounts dating back as far as 2700 B.C. describe the Chinese using marijuana for maladies ranging from rheumatism to constipation. There are similar reports of Indians, Africans, ancient Greeks and medieval Europeans using the substance to treat fevers, dysentery and malaria. In the United States, physicians documented the therapeutic properties of the drug as early as 1840, and the drug was included in the United States Pharmacopoeia, the official list of recognized medical drugs, from 1850 through 1942. During this period, lack of appetite was one of the indications for marijuana prescription. (7) Such anecdotal reports have been used by marijuana's adherents to support their wish to exempt the drug from the same scrutiny required for any other compound that is used to treat, ameliorate, or prevent human disease. Specifically, they have never campaigned vigorously for medical marijuana's evaluation by the Food and Drug Administration. …

The Rise of ‘Fringetech’: Regulatory Risks in Earned Wage Access

Abstract: By many accounts, the financial technology, or FinTech, sector appears to have developed an innovative solution to assist low-income workers with income shortfalls between standard paydays by displacing fringe financial service providers, namely payday lenders. Earned wage access programs facilitate early transfers of earned but unpaid wages to low-income workers through mobile platforms, algorithmic technology, and GPS tracking. To many, earned wage access programs represent a win-win for employees and employers. These programs are believed to be cheaper and safer alternatives to payday loans. Preliminary research also suggests these programs improve labor-retention rates for employers and help reduce financial distress for low-income employees. Consequently, a growing number of employers, including Walmart Inc. and Amazon.com, Inc., have partnered with earned wage access providers to offer these programs as an employee benefit. Employees may also use third-party providers that bypass employers to offer these programs directly through mobile app stores. In less than a decade, this nascent market has impressively achieved national scale, hundreds of thousands of employer partnerships, millions of users, and billions of dollars in transactions. Yet, notwithstanding and perhaps because of these early successes, these programs also have downsides that have been much less emphasized. In particular, although the gatekeeping role that employers may play when partnering with earned wage access programs has the potential to facilitate improved pricing and service terms in the fringe financial market, such a role also masks significant costs that are not fully disclosed to employees. Additionally, the earned wage access market creates detrimental regulatory blind spots and enables regulatory arbitrage by blurring the lines between once-distinct financial services: money-transmission services and loan services. Earned wage access programs have largely operated with minimal legal constraints because they have generally been characterized as money-transmission services, rather than loan services like payday loans. Building on the FinTech literature, by analogy, this Article argues that this blanket characterization of earned wage access programs is a mistake. Earned wage access programs have varying effects. In the absence of regulatory guardrails, some programs can perpetuate, and in some instances exacerbate, the very risks providers claim to eliminate when displacing short-term creditors like payday lenders. This Article proposes a federal-level regulatory framework based on lending laws that addresses some of these unmitigated risks through the imposition of consumer-protection requirements such as uniform price disclosure, ability-to-repay rules, optional amortization mechanics, mandatory credit reporting, and a right-to-rescind assignment. In doing so, this Article aims to facilitate growth of the earned wage access market’s functional improvements and prevent a mere shift to fringe FinTech, or “FringeTech,” services

Speak Not of Error

Abstract: Until recently, physicians argued that malpractice liability should be restricted because medical errors were few and far between. As the empirical literature made that position indefensible, physicians have conceded that medical errors are common, but they continue to call for tort reform, arguing that the alarmingly high frequency of medical errors is the legal system's fault. Malpractice liability is seemingly destined (at least among providers) to be always part of the problem, and never part of the solution. But why would a policy of penalizing unwanted conduct and mistakes not have an important role to play in a comprehensive strategy to make health care safer? The view that sanctions discourage targeted behaviors is at least as plausible as the assertion that punishments make errors more common; in our view, it is more plausible.

Hyper-Incarceration and Strategies of Disruption: Is There a Way Out?

Abstract: This paper explores exit strategies from our policy of hyper-incarceration. On the theory that the underlying causes of the policy are firmly entrenched, it focuses instead on disrupting the political micro-processes that make the policy seem acceptable. Part One describes these micro-processes. Parts Two through Four outline three forms of politics that might disrupt them: a politics of amelioration, a politics of transformation, and a politics of accommodation. Part V assesses the available choices for what is to be done.

The Astro-Nomos: On International Legal Paradigms and the Legal Status of the West Bank

Abstract: The continuous Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territory may well have exhausted the international community and exasperated the Palestinians, but it still stimulates the Israeli legal imagination. In 2012, the Israeli government established an expert committee to examine the status of Jewish construction in the West Bank. The committee's report concluded that from an international legal perspective, the West Bank is not occupied territory; the law of belligerent occupation is not applicable to the area; the "prevailing view" is that Jewish settlements are lawful; and that Israel has a valid claim to sovereignty over the territory. The article, combining a doctrinal analysis with both Cover's notion of 'Nomos and Narrative' and Kuhn's 'Structure of Scientific Revolutions,' posits that the report is epistemologically groundless and ethically blemished. The committee's reading of international law substitutes an ideology for professionalism. The ideology, resurrecting the long discredited colonialist/Orientalist paradigm, reflects an idiosyncratic utopian vision, one that is simultaneously hegemonic and insular. Consequently, its legal position is methodologically extraneous to the structure of international law, substantively at odds with the compelling commitment of the international community to self-determination, and ethically dystopian.