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.

Imagining Global Health with Justice: In Defense of the Right to Health

Abstract: The singular message in global health law is that we must strive to achieve global health with justice — improved population health, with a fairer distribution of benefits of good health. Global health entails ensuring the conditions of good health — public health, universal health coverage, and the social determinants of health — while justice requires closing today’s vast domestic and global health inequities. These conditions for good health should be incorporated into public policy, supplemented by specific actions to overcome barriers to equity.A new global health treaty grounded in the right to health and aimed at health equity — a Framework Convention on Global Health (FCGH) — stands out for its possibilities in helping to achieve global health with justice. This far-reaching legal instrument would establish minimum standards for universal health coverage and public health measures, with an accompanying national and international financing framework, require a constant focus on health equity, promote Health in All Policies and global governance for health, and advance the principles of good governance, including accountability. While achieving an FCGH is certainly ambitious, it is a struggle worth the efforts of us all. The treaty’s basis in the right to health, which has been agreed to by all governments has powerful potential to form the foundation of global governance for health.From interpretations of UN treaty bodies to judgments of national courts, the right to health is now sufficiently articulated to serve this role, with the individual’s right to health is best understood as a function of a social, political, and economic environment aimed at equity. However great the political challenge of securing state agreement to the FCGH, it is possible. States have joined other treaties with significant resource requirements and limitations on their sovereignty without significant reciprocal benefits from other states, while important state interests would benefit from the FCGH. And from integrating the FCGH into the existing human rights system to creative forms of compliance and enforcement and strengthened domestic legal and political accountability mechanisms, the treaty stands to improve right to health compliance. The potential for the FCGH to bring the right to health nearer to a universal reality calls for us to embark on the journey towards securing this global treaty.

The Supreme Court as Communicator: Carter's Contemporary Constitutional Lawmaking

Abstract: Contemporary understanding of constitutional law has been decisively shaped by American Legal Realism. One of Realism's legacies is an institutional division of labor between political science departments and law schools. Like all divisions of labor, this one has been both helpful and limiting. The political scientists have examined courts and judges as actors in the political system. Their studies have identified the political resources available to courts, illuminated the strategies that judges can use with their colleagues on the bench and elsewhere in the political system, and shown how the courts' output is articulated with inputs to and outputs of other political institutions.' Legal academics have appropriated these findings and incorporated them, in suitably diluted forms, in their normative analyses of constitutional law.2 Meanwhile, the legal academics have developed increasingly sophisticated normative theories of constitutional law,3 and the political scientists have similarly appropriated, diluted, and incorporated them into their positive analyses.4 As my formulation suggests, the institutional division of labor has led us to a situation in which we have sophisticated behavioral theories of constitutional law built on a relatively impoverished normative understanding, and sophisticated normative theories built on a relatively impoverished behavioral understanding. In Contemporary Constitutional Lawmaking: The

The Canon Wars

Abstract: Canons are taking their turn down the academic runway in ways that no one would have foretold just a decade ago. Affection for canons of construction has taken center stage in recent Supreme Court cases and in constitutional theory. Harvard Dean John Manning, and originalists Will Baude and Stephen Sachs, have all suggested that principles of “ordinary interpretation” - including canons - should inform constitutional interpretation. Given this new-found enthusiasm for canons, and their convergence in both constitutional and statutory law, it is not surprising that we now have two competing book-length treatments of the canons, one by Justice Scalia and Bryan Garner, Reading Law, and the other by Yale Law Professor William N. Eskridge, Interpreting Law. Both volumes purport to provide ways to use canons to read statutes and the Constitution. In this Review of Interpreting Law, we argue that this contemporary convergence on canons raises some significant interpretive questions about judicial power and the very idea of a canon.

Contracts, Constitutions, and Getting the Interpretation-Construction Distinction Right

Abstract: Interpretation determines the meaning of a legal actor’s words or other significant acts, construction their legal effect. Using contract law and then two nineteenth century theories of constitutional interpretation as examples, this Article advances four claims about interpretation, construction, and the relationship between the two. First, many theorists, following Francis Lieber, assume that rules of construction apply only when interpretation runs out, such as when a text’s meaning is ambiguous or does not address an issue. In fact, a rule of construction is always necessary to determine a legal speech act’s effect, including when its meaning is clear and definite. Construction does not supplement interpretation, but compliments it. Second, there exists more than one form of interpretation, and correspondingly more than one type of meaning. The meaning a text or other speech act has depends on the questions one asks of it. Third, which type of meaning is legally relevant depends on the applicable rule of construction. Rules of construction are in this sense conceptually prior to legal rules of interpretation. This priority has important consequences for how legal rules of interpretation are justified. Finally, because there exist multiple types of meaning, when one form of interpretation runs out, another form might step in. Whether that is so again depends on the applicable rule of construction. These four claims apply to legal interpretation and construction generally. This Article supports them with a close examination of the interpretation and construction of contractual agreements. It then argues that this account of interpretation and construction illuminates the shared structure of Joseph Story’s and Thomas Cooley’s theories of constitutional interpretation, and by extension theories of constitutional interpretation generally.

Public Reporting of Hospital Infection Rates: Ranking the States on Report and Website Content, Credibility, and Usability

Abstract: Health-care associated infections (“HAIs”) kill about 100,000 people annually; most are preventable, but many hospitals have not aggressively addressed the problem. In response, twenty-five states and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services require public reporting of hospital infection rates for at least some types of infections, and other states and private entities are implementing such reporting. The websites and related reports vary widely in ease of access, ease of use, usefulness of information, timeliness of updates, and credibility. We report on work in progress, in which we assess the quality and suitability of different state websites and reports for different target audiences (ordinary consumers; physicians, and infection control professionals) and the extent to which they meet best practices for online communication, including Stanford’s “Fogg” Guidelines for Web Credibility and user-friendliness metrics developed by other researchers. We find wide variation in quality, and substantial correlation between measures of website credibility and user-friendliness. We identify ways to improve usability, usefulness, and tailoring for information to different target audiences. Our analysis suggests that the “one website (and report format) fits all users” model may not work well in delivering complex, technical information to users with widely varying needs and sophistication.