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.

The Political Morality of Evidence Law

Abstract: This review essay discusses Alex Stein's recent book Foundations of Evidence Law. It focuses on explicating the book's general normative framework and then offers a critique of that framework from within the domain of political morality. Part I discusses Stein's views about the purpose of evidence law and the importance of error allocation. Part II explains how Stein derives his normative principles from probability theory. Part III discusses the book's master principle - the principle of maximal individualization. Part IV explains how this principle operates, along with two additional principles ("equality" and "equal best"), to regulate evidentiary issues. Part V evaluates the overall theory in light of two goals that the law of evidence must satisfy to a significant degree in order to be justified in terms of political morality: error reduction and the fair allocation of the risk of errors that do occur. The critique developed in this essay offers some reasons to question the extent to which Stein's theory would achieve either goal. The general theme of the critique is that a greater focus on the epistemology of proof would also lead to a more morally justified proof process, and thus that the epistemic and moral domains are more intertwined than the book supposes.

Who Benefits from Physician Wellness

Abstract: In their recent Position Paper for the CPA’s Professional Standards and Practice Committee, Myers and Freeland state that there is a “clear relationship between physician wellness and competence to practice medicine.” This grounding assumption, and other questionable claims about the dangers posed by physicians with burnout and the effectiveness of physician health programs, is not helpful to physicianemployees with or without mental health disorders. Physician wellness policies and initiatives in general seem more likely to help hospital management. Myers and Freeland’s statement about physician wellness and competence is similar to statements in the new Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education program requirements on resident well-being. The requirements claim that programs “have the same responsibility to address well-being as other aspects of resident competence.” The American Psychiatric Association Publishing Textbook of Psychiatry also states that “Psychiatrists will play an increasingly important role as leaders in medicine in the future and can help to emphasize the links among physician well-being, clinical competence, and the importance of well-being as an ethical imperative. . . . ” “[P]hysician wellness [is a term] used interchangeably with physician well-being” that loosely refers to health. The effect of defining physicians’ competence in terms of well-being is to refocus appraisals of physicians’ abilities not on their performance, but on their health. Another problem with physician wellness is that studies suggest physician wellness initiatives are not effective. Even if they were, it is doubtful that even effective treatments could overcome the harm done to physicians with mental health disorders by such stigmatizing links between wellness and competence. In addition, what might be framed a “voluntary” physician-initiated participation in a wellness program may often be more accurately characterized as an employerinitiated requirement for assessment of potential impairment. Imagine a physician who checks a box on his initial employment paperwork asking, “Would you like to sign up for our free mindfulness and relaxation classes?” or “Would you like to work with wellness counselors and hospital management to evaluate and improve your mental health and work performance?” Follow-up contact from the wellness program and subsequent participation may be appropriately characterized as voluntary. But what if a resident is called into a meeting with program leadership, who to her surprise, express concerns about her performance and say they want to provide their residents with every available resource they need to succeed: “Do you feel that psychological testing— which we can offer right here at the hospital wellness program—might be helpful?” I would argue that the resident’s subsequent participation and any “voluntary” waiver of confidentiality in this setting would not actually be voluntary. Furthermore, the authors’ medicalization of disruptive behavior and their references to “stigma” as essentially akin to “resistance” or as a problematic belief on the part of physician-employees may coerce compliance with these assessments. This is a problem with psychiatry in general that may be even more problematic in the already coercive environment of employment. The unintended consequence of these and other wellness policies and practices is that they grant physicians’ employers greater control over physicians’ private lives. Anything physician-employees do outside or inside the hospital can be said to interfere with, impair, or affect their well-being—and, by extension, harm patients. Linking physician well-being to competence opens the door to employers with strong personal opinions about certain therapies and lifestyle practices imposing those preferences on their physician-employees through implied threats that they will be labeled incompetent should they resist. These physician wellness policies are unlikely to actually help physician-employees. And they are even less likely to help physicians with mental health disorders or disabilities.

Sparse linearized iterative coherence estimation (SLICE) and risk assessment in image analysis

Abstract: Many methods form manifold learning have been proposed recently to accurately embed some high dimensional sets of points into low dimensional space. Most of these methods make assumptions about the spectral support of the high dimensional space being sampled and the consistency of these assumptions over time. Additionally, most of these methods do not directly incorporate a means of assessing the embedding in terms of probability distributions for estimation and detection purposes. Finally, most of these methods do not take into consideration noise in the estimation of the true underlying space. We propose a new method using sparse coherence-based estimation of distributions of points sampled from a high dimensional space that iteratively refines its notion of the support of the space. This approach will enable a new method of estimation, detection, and identification risk analysis and mitigation in a general class of image analysis problems.

Sovereign Immunity, Due Process, and the Alden Trilogy

Abstract: In Alden v. Maine, the Court held that the principle of sovereign immunity protects states from being sued without their consent in their own courts by private parties seeking damages for the states' violation of federal law. The Court thus rejected the "forum allocation" interpretation of the Eleventh Amendment, under which the Amendment serves merely to channel suits against the states based on federal law into the state courts, which are required by the Supremacy Clause to entertain such suits. The Court held instead that the Eleventh Amendment protects the states from being subjected to private damage liability by Congress acting through Article I. On the same day, however, the Court appeared to resurrect the forum allocation interpretation of the Eleventh Amendment with respect to a subset of federal laws: those that establish rights that constitute "property" or "liberty" within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process clause. The Court in Florida Prepaid v. College Savings Bank affirmed that patents are property and that a state violates the Due Process clause when it deprives persons of such property without affording them an adequate compensatory remedy. The extent to which the Due Process principle articulated in Florida Prepaid undoes the sovereign immunity principle articulated in Alden depends on the breadth of the concepts of property and liberty. Although the third case in the Alden trilogy, College Savings Bank v. Florida Prepaid, makes it clear that not all federal rights are "property" for purposes of the Due Process clause, other cases, which the Court did not reject or even discuss, stress that the concepts of liberty and property are broad indeed. In particular, the "new property" cases define property in such a way as to include the right to accrued wages invoked by the plaintiffs in Alden. Thus, the Florida Prepaid's Due Process exception to Alden's sovereign immunity principle may be broad enough to have required a different result in Alden itself, had the exception been invoked. Alternatively, the decision in Alden, alongside that in College Savings Bank, may signal a dramatic narrowing of the Court's definition of "property" and "liberty." If so, the sovereign immunity tail is beginning to wag a large Due Process dog.

Writing the Short Paper

Abstract: In this essay I comment on the recent proliferation of law review online companions, and argue that the short academic paper is both a distinctive genre and one that achieves important pedagogic value in legal education.