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.

A randomized, controlled, trial of short cycle intermittent compared to continuous antiretroviral therapy for the treatment of HIV infection in Uganda.

Abstract: BACKGROUND: Short cycle treatment interruption could reduce toxicity and drug costs and contribute to further expansion of antiretroviral therapy (ART) programs. METHODS: A 72 week non-inferiority trial enrolled one hundred forty six HIV positive persons receiving ART (CD4+ cell count > or =125 cells/mm(3) and HIV RNA plasma levels <50 copies/ml) in one of three arms: continuous 7 days on/7 days off and 5 days on/2 days off treatment. Primary endpoint was ART treatment failure determined by plasma HIV RNA level CD4+ cell count decrease death attributed to study participation or opportunistic infection. RESULTS: Following enrollment of 32 participants the 7 days on/7 days off arm was closed because of a failure rate of 31%. Six of 52 (11.5%) participants in the 5 days on/2 days off arm failed. Five had virologic failure and one participant had immunologic failure. Eleven of 51 (21.6%) participants in the continuous treatment arm failed. Nine had virologic failure with 1 death (lactic acidosis) and 1 clinical failure (extra-pulmonary TB). The upper 97.5% confidence boundary for the difference between the percent of non-failures in the 5 days on/2 days off arm (88.5% non-failure) compared to continuous treatment (78.4% non failure) was 4.8% which is well within the preset non-inferiority margin of 15%. No significant difference was found in time to failure in the 2 study arms (p = 0.39). CONCLUSIONS: Short cycle 5 days on/2 days off intermittent ART was at least as effective as continuous therapy. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT00339456.

The Politics of Legislative Drafting: A Congressional Case Study

Abstract: In judicial opinions construing statutes, it is common for judges to make a set of assumptions about the legislative process that generated the statute under review. For example, judges regularly impute to legislators highly detailed knowledge about both judicial rules of interpretation and the substantive area of law of which the statute is a part. Little empirical research has been done to test this picture of the legislative process. In this Article, Professors Nourse and Schacter take a step toward filling this gap with a case study of legislative drafting in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Their results stand in sharp contrast to the traditional judicial story of the drafting process. The interviews conducted by the authors suggest that the drafting process is highly variable and contextual; that staffers, lobbyists, and professional drafters write laws rather than elected representatives; and that although drafters are generally familiar with judicial rules of construction, these rules are not systematically integrated into the drafting process. The case study suggests not only that the judicial story of the legislative process is inaccurate but also that there might be important differences between what the legislature and judiciary value in the drafting process: While courts tend to prize what the authors call the "interpretive" virtues of textual clarity and interpretive awareness, legislators are oriented more toward "constitutive" virtues of action and agreement. Professors Nourse and Schacter argue that the results they report, if reflective of the drafting process generally, raise important challenges for originalist and textualist theories of statutory interpretation, as well as Justice Scalia's critique of legislative history. Even if the assumptions about legislative drafting made in the traditional judicial story are merely fictions, they nonetheless play a role in allocating normative responsibility for creating statutory law. The authors conclude that their case study raises the need for future empirical research to develop a better understanding of the legislative process.

Aspects of the Theory of Moral Cognition: Investigating Intuitive Knowledge of the Prohibition of Intentional Battery and the Principle of Double Effect

Abstract: Where do our moral intuitions come from? Are they innate? Does the brain contain a module specialized for moral judgment? Does the human genetic program contain instructions for the acquisition of a sense of justice or moral sense? Questions like these have been asked in one form or another for centuries. In this paper we take them up again, with the aim of clarifying them and developing a specific proposal for how they can be empirically investigated. The paper presents data from six trolley problem studies of over five hundred individuals, including one group of Chinese adults and one group of American children, which suggest that both adults and children ages 8-12 rely on intuitive knowledge of moral principles, including the prohibition of intentional battery and the principle of double effect, to determine the permissibility of actions that require harming one individual in order to prevent harm to others. Significantly, the knowledge in question appears to be merely tacit: when asked to explain or justify their judgments, subjects were consistently incapable of articulating the operative principles on which their judgments appear to have been based. We explain these findings with reference to an analogy to human linguistic competence. Just as normal persons are typically unaware of the principles guiding their linguistic intuitions, so too are they often unaware of the principles guiding their moral intuitions. These studies pave the way for future research by raising the possibility that specific poverty of the stimulus arguments can be formulated in the moral domain. Differences between our approach to moral cognition and those of Piaget (1932), Kohlberg (1981), and Greene et al. (2001) are also discussed.

Organized Illusions: A Behavioral Theory of Why Corporations Mislead Stock Market Investors (and Cause Other Social Harms)

Abstract: The standard rational actor model of organizational behavior leads one to question why corporations would mislead the investing public when neither the company nor its managers were trading in securities. After a brief investigation of answers to this problem in traditional economic terms, this article seeks to use modern institutionalist theory on organizational behavior to argue that corporate belief systems can become "unrealistic" (and hence the source of possible corporate misrepresentations about its risks and future prospects) because of predictable distortions in information flow and, more importantly, perceptual biases among managers. The potentially adaptive role of bias in corporate cultures is considered, along with possible implications for securities law. The article then extends the account based on these cognitive and informational forces to other forms of socially harmful corporate behavior.

Rewriting Frankenstein Contracts: The Workout Prohibition in Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities

Abstract: Modification-proof contracts boost commitment and can help overcome information problems. But when such rigid contracts are ubiquitous, they can function as social suicide pacts, compelling enforcement despite significant externalities. At the heart of the current financial crisis is a contract designed to be hyperrigid: the pooling and servicing agreement (“PSA”), which governs residential mortgage securitization. The PSA combines formal, structural, and functional barriers to its own modification with restrictions on the modification of underlying mortgage loans. Such layered rigidities fuel foreclosures, with spillover effects for homeowners, communities, financial institutions,financial markets, and the macroeconomy.This Article situates PSAs in the context of theoretical and policy debates about contract rigidity, bond contract modification, and contractual bankruptcy. We propose a typology of contract rigidities, ranging from formal prohibition on amendment (formal rigidity) to extreme collective action problems (functional rigidity). We then draw on New Deal jurisprudence for strategies to overcome each type of rigidity. These strategies include narrowly tailored legislation that renders the problematic terms unenforceable on public policy grounds, administrative restructuring mandates, and special bankruptcy regimes.The New Deal experience highlights the spillover effects of widespread contract practices, the limits of voluntary modification, and the utility of targeted government mandates to rewrite problematic terms. It also reveals the limits of such mandates. When different kinds of rigidity combine in a complex web of contracts, a comprehensive mechanism like bankruptcy may be necessary, if not always sufficient, to break the logjam.Rewriting PSAs will not resolve today’s financial crisis. Yet voluntary foreclosure prevention initiatives are unlikely to succeed as long as contract rigidities persist. The continuing foreclosure epidemic also holds an important lesson for the future: even where contract rigidity makes perfect sense for the parties, pervasive rigidities can have catastrophic consequences for financial stability and for society.