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.

Health Care Costs and the Arc of Innovation

Abstract: Health care costs continue their inexorable rise, threatening America’s long-term fiscal stability, competitiveness, and standard of living. Over the past half-century, efforts to rein in spending have uniformly failed. In this Article, we explain why, breaking with standard accounts of regulatory and market dysfunction. We point instead to the nexus of economics, mutual empathy, and social expectations that drives medical innovation and locks in low-value technologies. We show how law reflects and rein-forces this nexus — and how and why health-policy-makers avert their gaze. Next, we propose to circumvent these barriers instead of surmounting them. Rather than targeting today’s excessive spending, we seek to leverage available legal tools to bend the arc of innovation, away from marginally-beneficial technology and toward high-value advances. To this end, we set forth a novel, value-based approach to pricing and patent protection — one that departs sharply from current practice by rewarding innovators in proportion to the therapeutic benefits new tests and treatments yield. Using cancer therapy as an example, we explain how emerging information technology and large troves of electronic clinical data are opening the way to near-real-time assessment of efficacy. We then show how such assessment can power ongoing adjustment of pricing and patent terms. Finally, we offer a blueprint for how laws governing health care payment and intellectual property can be tailored to realize this value-focused vision. For the reasons we lay out, the transformation of incentives we urge will both slow clinical spending growth and greatly enhance the social value that this spending yields.

The Story of Meinhard v. Salmon and Fiduciary Duty's Punctilio

Abstract: Benjamin Cardozo's 1928 opinion in Meinhard v. Salmon that co-venturers owe each other "the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive" remains, 80 years later, a defining point for framing the discussion of fiduciary duty, still the most important issue in the law of business associations. This work develops the story of Messers. Meinhard and Salmon and their relationship with the very wealthy Livingston/Gerry family who owned the land in New York City at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street that gave rise to this long-running dispute. The context helps delineate the scope of fiduciary duty in a way that Cardozo's memorable language does not. This in turn leads to a discussion of the role of private ordering in structuring relationships where such a duty may not be desired and what this classic case may tell us about contracting out of fiduciary duty in a modern setting.

State Greenhouse Gas Regulation, Federal Climate Change Legislation, and the Preemption Sword

Abstract: This article, derived from a paper first given at a 2009 Conference at San Diego Law School, analyzes the rationales for retention of state authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions even if federal climate legislation were enacted that primarily utilizes a cap-and-trade strategy. Climate policy activism and innovation by numerous states and local governments over the past decade in the absence of a federal climate law has been analyzed extensively. This article links the rationales for preservation of state climate regulatory authority to the substantial risks of at least partial regulatory failure faced by any federal law. It is substantially likely that a federal climate change law will prove too lax, be too slow to reduce emission levels, incorrectly predict climate change effects and science, or overestimate compliance costs. If such a law preempted state authority, then the dynamic of state regulatory activity as catalyst for improved or new federal law would be lost. In addition, room for state climate innovations and experimentation could be discouraged or precluded, denying states the ability to tailor their efforts to their state’s particular risks and opportunities, and denying everyone benefits of successful innovations. Furthermore, since most greenhouse gas emissions involve co-pollutants or are also regulated for other effects, any attempt at a preemptive federal climate law could be used to preclude other areas of state regulation. Of particular importance is retention of state authority to require polluters to emit less than federally allowed and also retire allowances or charge more in carbon allowances per unit of greenhouse gas emitted. Without this last form of retained authority, then regardless of other language, only the level of a federal cap would matter. After reviewing the preemption choices in a federal climate bill, the article shows how preemption jurisprudence makes ambiguous or even mildly preemptive language regarding retained state authority substantially likely to be given broad effect by agencies or courts, especially in applying “obstacle” preemption doctrine. The article closes by suggesting anti-preemptive statutory criteria and relegation of any preemption claims to a Preemption Review Committee that would base preemption judgments on statutory criteria and record evidence of problematic conflicts.

Global Health Law

Abstract: This chapter provides an overview of the emerging field of global health law. It examines the historical origins of the field and the factors contributing to its development. In addition, the chapter considers the nature and sources of international law. It then describes the process of international lawmaking as well as the contribution of international organizations to the development of global health law. The chapter closes with a discussion of role of binding and non-binding instruments in global health policy, the advantages and disadvantages of different legal forms, and lessons for future global health law negotiations.

The Evolving Complexity of Dispute Resolution Ethics

Abstract: This Essay argues that conventional conceptions of the lawyer’s role as an advocate for a client with the purpose of maximizing client gain have resulted in a code of ethics and body of law that enshrines adversarial ethics as a normative matter. Adversarial ethics are inadequate for many lawyer roles, including those of mediator, arbitrator, advisor, and facilitator, and they distort the other roles lawyers might play when they conduct themselves as problem-solving professionals. This Essay reviews the developments (and lack of appropriate developments) in the evolving ethical issues presented by these other lawyers’ roles and suggests that trans-substantive adversarial assumptions in lawyers’ work should be reconsidered, with more context-based ethical principles and practices.