Pain on the Brain: A Week of Guest Posts on Pain Neuroimaging & Law

By Amanda C. Pustilnik

This week, the Petrie-Flom Center of Harvard Law School and the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior (CLBB) at Massachusetts General Hospital are hosting a series of posts on how brain imaging can help the law address issues of physical and emotional pain. Our contributors are world leaders in their fields, who participated on June 30, 2015, in the CLBB/Petrie-Flom conference Visible Solutions: How Brain Imaging Can Help Law Reenvision Pain.  They addressed questions including:

  • Can brain imaging can be a “painometer” to prove pain in legal cases?
  • Can neuroimaging help law do better at understanding what pain is?
  • How do emotion and pain relate to each other?
  • Does brain imaging showing emotional pain prompt us to reconsider law’s mind/body divide?

Professor Irene Tracey, D.Phil., a pioneer in pain neuroimaging and director of the Oxford Centre for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain, opened the conference with a keynote explaining what happens when the brain is in pain.

Professor Hank T. Greely, Edelman Johnson Professor of Law and Director of the Program in Neuroscience and Society at Stanford Law School, provided a keynote explaining the many implications of brain imaging for the law.

This conference was the culmination of CLBB’s year of work on pain neuroimaging and law. As the first CLBB-Petrie-Flom Center Senior Fellow on Law & Applied Neuroscience, I focused on pain because it is one of the largest social, economic, and legal problems that can be addressed through new insights into the brain. Pain imaging can be a test case for how neuroscience can contribute positively to law and culture.  (Full conference video proceedings are available here.)  Please read on below! Read More

Payments to Egg “Donors”

By David Orentlicher

[cross-posted at HealthLawProfs blog and orentlicher.tumblr.com]

Interesting article in today’s Wall Street Journal about a lawsuit over limits on payments by fertility clinics to women who supply eggs for infertile couples. Under influential, though not mandatory, guidelines issued by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, payments to egg “donors” above $5,000 “require justification,” and payments greater than $10,000 “are not appropriate.” (When I was in the Indiana legislature, a statute was passed limiting payments to $4,000, plus out-of-pocket expenses.)

In one view, payment caps are needed to “prevent coercion and exploitation in the egg-donation process.” But one also can view the guidelines as an “illegal conspiracy to set prices in violation of antitrust laws.” More to come in a case that could go to trial next year.

In the meantime, there are other important concerns about payments for eggs and the costs to infertile persons. As with other assisted reproductive treatments, insurers generally do not cover those costs. This encourages the infertile to seek multiple births in one treatment cycle rather than single births over multiple treatment cycles, which puts mothers and their infants at greater risks to health. In addition, lack of coverage leaves treatment unaffordable for many of the infertile. As I have argued elsewhere (here and here), social policy treats infertile persons unfairly when coverage is denied for assisted reproductive services,

HIPAA and the Physician-Patient Privilege: Can Doctors Defending Against Medical Malpractice Suit Carry Out Ex Parte Interviews with the Plaintiff’s Treating Physicians?

By Alex Stein

Whether a litigant’s right to conduct informal ex parte interviews with fact witnesses extends to the plaintiffs’ treating physicians, given the confidentiality provisions of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), is a question of considerable practical importance. This question has recently received a positive answer from the Kentucky Supreme Court in Caldwell v. Chauvin, — S.W.3d —-, 2015 WL 3653447, (Ky. 2015), after “percolating through state courts, federal district courts, and academic circles for a decade.” Id. at *5. Read More

Bioethicist Art Caplan: Planned Parenthood’s awkward clash

A new opinion piece by contributor Art Caplan in The Chicago Tribune (free registration required):

Planned Parenthood finds itself under attack by anti-abortion activists. Not much new about that. But the terrain of the battle has shifted. The way in which fetal tissue for research is obtained at Planned Parenthood clinics is now center stage.

Planned Parenthood stands accused, as a result of a sting operation launched by anti-abortion political operatives, of selling “baby parts” for profit. Edited videos show individuals pretending to be tissue brokers discussing with Planned Parenthood doctors how to get fetal tissue, the cost for tissues, techniques for increasing the chance of obtaining particular tissues and other related issues. The doctors do not come across well. Discussions are in restaurants, there is wine on the table, the attitudes are cavalier and the doctors don’t seem to pick up on the cues that they are getting set up. […]

Read the full article here.

Check out the latest news from the Petrie-Flom Center!

Check out the July 24th edition of the Petrie-Flom Center’s biweekly e-newsletter for the latest on events, affiliate news and scholarship, and job and fellowship opportunities in health law policy and bioethics.

Featured in this edition:

November 4, 2015 1:00 – 5:30 PM  
Harvard Law School

Please join us for an afternoon of reflection on the life, work, and enduring influence of Professor Alan Wertheimer (1942-2015). Professor Wertheimer was a leading philosopher of law and bioethics, making critical contributions to clinical research ethics; theories of coercion, undue influence, and exploitation; consent in a variety of contexts, and much more. This tribute event will feature leading scholars discussing and engaging with Professor Wertheimer’s many contributions, and exploring how he influenced their own work.

At the time of his death in 2015, Alan Wertheimer was Senior Research Scholar in the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health. He was Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Vermont, where he taught from 1968 to 2005 and was honored as University Scholar in 1995-1996. Before retiring from UVM, he was also John G. McCullough Professor of Political Science. He authored  Coercion (Princeton University Press, 1987), Exploitation (Princeton University Press, 1996), Consent to Sexual Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Rethinking the Ethics of Clinical Research: Widening the Lens (Oxford University Press, 2011). He was twice a Visiting Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and held fellowships at the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton (1984-85) and the Program in Ethics and the Professions, Harvard University (1989-90).

This event is free and open to the public but seating is limited and registration is required. Register now online

‘The Week in Health Law’ Podcast

By Nicolas Terry

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This week we discussed Fraud & Abuse Laws and the “Two-Midnight” Rule with Elizabeth Weeks Leonard from the Georgia Law faculty. You can find many of Professor Leonard’s publications here.

The Week in Health Law Podcast from Frank Pasquale and Nicolas Terry is a commuting-length discussion about some of the more thorny issues in Health Law & Policy.

Subscribe at iTunes, listen at Stitcher RadioTunein and Podbean, or search for The Week in Health Law in your favorite podcast app.

Show notes and more are at TWIHL.com. If you have comments, an idea for a show or a topic to discuss you can find us on twitter @nicolasterry @FrankPasquale @WeekInHealthLaw

Another Opinion Upholding the Contraceptives Coverage Accommodation

Today, the 10th Circuit issued its opinion in the Little Sisters of the Poor case, holding that the accommodation offered to religious nonprofits – and now also to certain closely-held for-profits – is legally acceptable under the standard imposed by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA).  The accommodation, just recently finalized in its current form, allows eligible employers to avoid covering contraceptives for their employees so long as they notify their insurer or the government of their religious objection to doing so. Importantly, employees are still legally guaranteed access to free contraceptives through alternate mechanisms, usually the via insurer directly.

The 10th Circuit’s opinion represents the fifth win for the administration on the accommodation issue following Hobby Lobby. (Note that Hobby Lobby was about an employer who was not previously eligible for the accommodation.)  The RFRA standard provides that the government “may substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion only if it demonstrates that application of the burden to the person—(1) is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest; and (2) is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.”

In Little Sisters, the 10th Circuit dispensed with the RFRA claim by holding that there was no substantial burden, one of the threshold questions in the RFRA analysis.  It explained that the fact of the employer’s opt-out does not *cause* contraceptives coverage (i.e., by requiring another party to provide coverage in their stead), which instead is mandated by federal law.  It also determined that there is no substantial burden from complicity in the overall scheme to deliver contraceptive coverage, i.e., by delivering notice of objection, because their only involvement in the scheme is the act of opting out.  Thus, RFRA’s protections were not implicated, and the accommodation can stand.

I fully agree with the result in this case, but would have gotten there another way.

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Patent Law, Expertise, and the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit

by Zachary Shapiro

Since its creation in 1982, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) has been a magnet for controversy and criticism. While I do not align myself with those critics, it would be foolish to not acknowledge the problems that are present with the CAFC. For instance, for the vast majority of federal law, when law develops differently in different circuits, the Supreme Court is able to observe those developments, and decide which interpretation is most desirable. Because the CAFC has sole jurisdiction over patent law appeals, patent law is not subject to these circuit splits. While splits temporarily hamper uniform justice, they do allow for experimentation, enabling different legal interpretations to be tested in real life. In this way, splits can allow an appellate body to make a more informed decision regarding which interpretation should be followed.

The lack of circuit splits in patent law can be problematic, given accusations that the CAFC has succumbed to a form of institutional capture by the patent lobby.[1] Critics highlight the CAFC’s decision in Amazon[2] and eBay[3] as evidence of this capture. In Amazon, the CAFC found a broad presumption of irreparable harm, allowing for broad extension of preliminary injunctions in future cases of patent infringement (even though they overturned the injunction at issue in the case). This patent-holder-friendly standard was ultimately overruled in eBay,[4] after the CAFC applied its nearly automatic injunction standard. The Supreme Court overturned this decision, and dialed back the presumption, in large part because it was seen as too favorable to patent holders.

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