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.

The Invention of Health Law

Abstract: By default, the courts are inventing health law. The law governing the American health system arises from an unruly mix of statutes, regulations, and judge-crafted doctrines conceived, in the main, without medical care in mind. Courts are ill-equipped to put order to this chaos, and until recently they have been disinclined to try. But political gridlock and popular ire over managed care have pushed them into the breach, and the Supreme Court has become a proactive health policy player. How might judges make sense of health law's disparate doctrinal strands? Scholars from diverse ideological starting points have converged toward a single answer: the law should look to deploy medical resources in a systematically rational manner, so as to maximize the benefits that every dollar buys. This answer bases the orderly development of health care law upon our ability to reach stable understandings, in myriad circumstances, of what welfare maximization requires. In this Article, I contend that this goal is not achievable. Scientific ignorance, cognitive limitations, and normative disagreements yield shifting, incomplete, and contradictory understandings of social welfare in the health sphere. The chaotic state of health care law today reflects this unruliness. In making systemic welfare maximization the lodestar for health law, we risk falling so far short of aspirations for reasoned decision making as to invite disillusion about the possibilities for any sort of rationality in this field. Accordingly, I urge that we define health law's aims more modestly, based on acknowledgment that its rationality is discontinuous across substantive contexts and changeable with time. This concession to human limits, I argue, opens the way to health policy that mediates wisely between our desire for public action to maximize the well being of the many and our intimate wishes to be treated non-instrumentally, as separate ends. I conclude with an effort to identify the goals that health law, so constructed, should pursue and to suggest how a strategy of accommodation among these goals might apply to a variety of legal controversies.

Mortgage Market, Character and Trends: United States

Abstract: The United States housing finance system has undergone multiple evolutions accompanying its dynamic mortgage history. The early days of homeownership funding before and during the Great Depression were characterised by instability and risk. Over the next several decades, reform gradually led housing finance to its heyday as a stable foundation for the ‘American dream’. However, this stability proved misleading as US financial companies pursued increasingly risky practices, partly reverting back to the fragile structure in place before the New Deal. Ultimately, the pursuit of risky products and cheap credit provoked unsustainable growth in housing prices that culminated in the financial crisis of 2008, severely disrupting both domestic and global financial systems. Now on the process to recovery, the US mortgage market is undergoing a possible structural transformation that embraces securitisation, without abandoning the initial spirit of the New Deal. The effectiveness of this transformation is yet to be determined. Only by reinstating transparency, securitisation, and defence mechanisms against the procyclicality of leverage can the United States restore stability to the foundation that supports millions of American lives and homes.

Legal Negotiation in Popular Culture: What Are We Bargaining For?

Abstract: This essay analyzes the treatment of legal negotiations in films, literature, TV and various forms of popular culture, focusing on how legal negotiations are conceptualized often as competitive, war-like battles of will and force or cleverness, rather than more modern approaches to negotiation as a site of collaborative human problem solving and joint decision making. The essay begins a filmography of legal negotiation, including both popular films and TV and serious documentary treatments of both domestic and international negotiations. The article concludes by discussing some newer approaches to legal and international conflict negotiations evidenced in a few new films and documentaries and suggests that life is advancing faster than art in this area: to wit, modern negotiations are more complex in execution, performance and agreement-making and are not well depicted in many fictional and formulaic forms.