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.

Systemic Risk Management Plan for Electronic Medical Records (EMR): Why and How?

Abstract: Electronic patient data use and handling are critical issues in terms of privacy, confidentiality, security, and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations. The risks associated with electronic patient data are not limited to identity theft but rather include a person's social, economic, and psychological well-being. However, there have not been many studies that have focused on the associated risk factors that could lead to these situations. This paper identifies those risks related to electronic patient data breaches by means of a grounded theory approach and develops a systemic risk management plan that enables engineering managers and risk managers to more effectively and efficiently overcome risks associated with electronic patient data. Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify the risks associated with electronic patient data breach using a grounded theory approach and also to recommend a set of guidelines to support a better, effective, and efficient system and thereby overcome these risks. Patients and methods: No patients were involved either to participate in this study or any of their opinions are reflected with this research.

Twenty-First Century Equal Protection: Making Law in an Interregnum

Abstract: This essay on Justice O'Connor's concurring opinion in Lawrence v. Texas argues that her framing of an explicit heightened rational basis standard potentially carries great importance for equal protection law. In Lawrence, the opinion of the Court held that the Texas criminal sodomy law violated the individual's liberty interest in engaging in private intimate conduct. Justice O'Connor concurred solely on equal protection grounds, in a brief but pithy opinion which sought to explain why she found the Texas statute unconstitutional under normally deferential rational basis review. She asserted that certain kinds of cases, where there was evidence of animus or bias infecting the legislative process, triggered heightened rationality review. Professor Hunter argues that the O'Connor opinion has the potential not only to clarify inadequately reasoned gay rights decisions such as Romer v. Evans, but also to allow the Court to take responsibility for a shadowy lower mid-level standard of review that it has in fact been deploying, erratically, for three decades. Using documents only recently made available to the public as part of Justice Blackmun's papers, Professor Hunter traces the internal debates within the Court on levels of scrutiny in equal protection cases. She proposes that courts and scholars conceptualize the current equal protection claims by non-suspect groups as proceeding in a constitutional interregnum, suffused with complex political dynamics and tricky questions of judicial legitimacy. This essay considers the formulation of heightened rational basis review in Justice O'Connor's concurrence as a response to the reality that this interregnum, in light of the conservatism of the federal judiciary, could continue for a significant period of time. Moreover, unlike the period when early civil rights cases were being litigated before Congress had ever enacted significant civil rights laws, this interregnum occurs at a time of wide expectation that if equality claims are legitimate, they will succeed in legislatures. Is it appropriate for judges to approach adjudication as if it is an attempt to predict subsequent legislative action? The very nature of an interregnum suggests uncertainty and disruption, yet law promises order and fairness. Professor Hunter's essay considers the O'Connor proposal for heightened rational basis in this context. The final version of the essay will be published in the Georgetown Journal of Gender and Law.

Jupiter as Everyman: Michael Reisman and the Scholar as Teacher

Abstract: These are Chief Judge Baker’s remarks reflecting on the scholarship of Professor Michael Reisman in the field of national security law. Chief Judge Baker comments that Professor Reisman is a prolific writer and Scholar-Teacher dedicated to the study of force, minimization of suffering, and the advancement of human dignity and the law. He discusses how Professor Reisman’s work is distinctive in that it identifies and incorporates the critical influence of process, both formal and informal, in decisionmaking, which sometimes overshadows substance.

Our Unsettled Ninth Amendment: An Essay on Unenumerated Rights and the Impossibility of Textualism

Abstract: The Ninth Amendment - our resident anarchic and sarcastic "constitutional jester" - mocks the effort of scholars and judges alike to tame and normalize constitutional law. It is not as if the stern disciplinarians haven't tried. We now have two generations worth of painstaking, erudite, and occasionally brilliant scholarship that attempts to rein it in. Yet the amendment stubbornly resists control. It stands as a paradoxical, textual monument to the impossibility of textualism, an entrenched, settled instantiation of the inevitability of unsettlement. If it did not exist, constitutional skeptics would have had to invent it.This essay has two parts. In Part I, I present a new and, I hope, persuasive, originalist account of the Ninth Amendment. My claim is that the Amendment deliberately leaves unsettled the status of unenumerated rights. Because of the Ninth Amendment, the Constitution does not "deny" or "disparage" these rights, but neither does it embrace or imply them. The amendment puts off to another day a final reckoning of the extent to which we are bound by constitutional text.Although I use originalist methodology in Part I, I do not want to be understood as embracing originalism. Instead, this Part is an exercise in internal critique. As Part II explains, the Ninth Amendment states a truth that we would have to deal with whether or not it was part of the original text: No matter how comprehensive, no text can control the force of ideas and commitments that lie outside the text. This simple truth leaves the status of liberal constitutionalism permanently and inevitably unsettled. The day of final reckoning will never arrive.