Category: Dov Fox

GOP Confusion Over Stem Cell Research

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Bill of Health Contributor Dov Fox has a new article up on the Huffington Post:

Republican candidates convened last night for the first debates of the 2016 campaign. The presidential hopefuls disagreed on every topic they faced — immigration, health care, foreign policy, gay rights, the economy — all but one, that is. Their differences of opinion disappeared each time they were asked about the controversy over the recent release of an undercover video with Planned Parenthood. On the issue raised by that edited film clip, the candidates came together in a rare consensus.

All 17 — from Ted Cruz to Carly Fiorina — staunchly opposed research that uses tissue cells from aborted or miscarried fetuses. The candidates unanimously called for Congress to end its support of Planned Parenthood over its contribution to that research, with some like Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal joining party leaders who would force a government shutdown over that issue. This, after Senate Republicans earlier this week failed to clear a procedural vote to defund. […]

Read the full article here.

Reproductive Malpractice and the U.S. Military

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Check out the new op-ed at HuffPo by Bill of Health bloggers Dov Fox and Alex Stein on the unfair treatment of American servicewomen (and their children) under the Feres doctrine should they fall victim to medical malpractice during their pregnancy or delivery. Fox and Stein call for SCOTUS to fix the loophole it left open in the 1950 case, or for Congress to “set up a fund for compensating children whose disabilities were caused by substandard care at military medical facilities.”  Take a look at the full post here.

Are Egg Donors like Miners and Boxers?

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By Dov Fox

The U.S. tax court has just issued its long-awaited decision in Perez v. Commissioner, 144 T.C. No. 4 (Jan. 22, 2015). (Hat tip to Richard Carpenter, who represented Perez.) The case decided whether the $20,000 a woman called Nichelle Perez received to provide her eggs is, for IRS purposes, taxable income, or, instead, recovery for physical damages, which would make that payment tax-free. An introduction to this case is available in my earlier Bill of Health post: Can you be taxed for selling your eggs?, and at greater length in last year’s Taxing Eggs: A Mini Symposium, over at the Faculty Lounge. And the opinion cites thoughtful articles by Professors Kim Krawiec, Bridget Crawford, and Lisa Milot.)

The legal question presented was whether the payments Perez received are tax-exempt “damages” under Section 104 of the Internal Revenue Code. The court held they did not, and thus could be taxed. Judge Holmes observed that the contracts had characterized those payments as consideration for pain and suffering rather than the eggs themselves. He explained that “the injury here, as painful as it was to Perez, was exactly within the scope of the medical procedures to which she contractually consented.” Accordingly, “the payments were made not to compensate her for some unwanted invasion against her bodily integrity but to compensate her for services rendered.” Despite the pain and danger Perez incurred through the process of egg retrieval, Judge Holmes affirmed that “the money she received was not ‘damages'” because “she voluntarily signed a contract to be paid to endure” those risks. I’d be interested to learn whether readers find persuasive the Court’s provocative analogies to egg “donation”: Read More

Dov Fox on Racial Sorting in Family Formation

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Check out Dov Fox‘s new op-ed on racial sorting in family formation over at Huffington Post: Reproducing Race.

The piece was prompted by this week’s news of the white lesbian mother who sued a sperm bank for mixing up the sample she ordered with that from a black donor. The impulse to call one’s mixed-race child a “wrongful birth” gives reason, Dov argues, to rethink the racial preferences that we tend to accept without question; race-matching should be resisted for expressing the divisive notion that single-race families should be preferred to multiracial ones and that families should be set apart by race.

The Expressive Dimension of Donor Deferral

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By Dov Fox

The Guardian and L.A. Times are the latest major news organizations to decry trans-Atlantic restrictions on blood donation by men who have sex with men (MSM). The case against such categorical bans has been reignited by an influential piece that Bill of Health editor Glenn Cohen recently published with co-authors Jeremy Feigenbaum and Eli Adashi in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Cohen, Feigenbaum, and Adashi make a powerful case why sexual orientation should be just one component among others used to assess the risk that blood donors might spread HIV.[i]

But their argument elides exactly what is—and isn’t—wrong with excluding men who have sex with men from donating blood. At times they suggest the longstanding U.S. ban reflects “outdated homophobic perceptions.” Yet they acknowledge that it was “well-intentioned and guided by a need to protect the integrity of the national blood supply.” Indeed, the Food and Drug Administration that enacted the lifetime MSM ban solicited guidance from the National Gay Task Force whose recommendations were adopted into Red Cross blood collection procedures.[ii] It’s unlikely the policy was motivated by animus as opposed to concern for public health.

Elsewhere, the authors imply the policy’s chief offense is that it deprives MSM of a crucial “civic opportunity.” But giving blood, even if it shares the life-saving potential of military service and registration as an organ donor, is not typically regarded as a duty of citizenship tantamount to voting or jury service.[iii] So it’s not its effects on those it excludes that makes the donor ban so bad.

The best reason to let low-risk gay men give blood lies in the demeaning message that excluding them expresses, what I’ve called the expressive dimension of donor deferral.  Read More

The U.S. Supreme Court vs. The American Psychological Association

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By Dov Fox

The U.S. Supreme Court has not in recent years held the views of the American Psychological Association (APA) in so high regard as it did this week.

In 2012, the Court set aside the APA’s arguments for why due process requires the exclusion of eyewitness testimony obtained under suggestive circumstances that rendered it especially likely to be unreliable.

And in 2011, when the Court struck down on free speech grounds a state regulation on violent video games, it gave short shrift to the APA’s warnings about those games’ connection to violent behavior in young boys.

But in its recent death penalty decision, Florida v. Hall, the Court relied heavily on important APA insights in declaring it unconstitutional for states to set an IQ cutoff to determine whether a prisoner is eligible to receive capital punishment. Read More

Michael Jackson and Emotional Damages

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By Dov Fox

You know the King of Pop died in 2009 while rehearsing for a comeback tour in London. Here’s a twist you may not have heard about: Michael Jackson fan club members sued Conrad Murray, the doctor who administered the lethal overdose of anesthesia. And the celebrity enthusiasts won. A French court recently awarded five of the grieving fans economic damages (albeit just a euro each) to compensate for their emotional suffering.

The case highlights a neglected problem in our own law, not just medical malpractice, but constitutional and common law too. It’s this: Supreme Court rules and policies about harm, compulsion, and intentionality rely on the flawed assumption that operations of the mind are meaningfully distinct from those of the body. In our new essay on Dualism and Doctrine, Alex Stein and I (1) demonstrate just how this fiction distorts the law, (2) argue that the reasons for its persistence cannot save it, and (3) identify the ways in which courts should uproot dualism’s pernicious influence on our legal system. Read More

On Patents, Patients and the Public Interest

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By Michael Young

Earlier this month, a U.S. District Court in Delaware issued an injunction to bar sales of a minimally invasive Medtronic replacement heart valve that putatively infringed on competitor’s Edwards Lifesciences valve system patent.  After this ruling was issued, Medtronic filed an emergency motion requesting stay and expedited appeal of this injunction, contending that that “if the injunction were permitted to go into effect, treatable patients [with aortic annuli larger than 25mm for whom Edwards’ valve is not suited] may unnecessarily die in the name of already expired patent rights. Put simply, the calamity to public health that would result from the injunction is premised on a legally improper extension of patent rights” (Medtronic v. Edwards, 08-CV-0091, 2014).  Shortly thereafter, The Federal Court Circuit of Appeals agreed to postpone the injunction and to expedite Medtronic’s appeal.

While still unraveling, this case offers unique insights into the important yet often overlooked dialectic between patient safety and patent rights.

Read More

Genetic Mugshots

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By Dov Fox

New technologies can put pressure on the logic of the law. Consider the well-settled legal conclusion that equal protection rights don’t apply when police use race-based descriptions to look for suspects. An emerging forensic technique called DNA phenotyping makes it hard to defend this reliance on racial proxies–rather than appearance itself–in the investigation of crime.

Phenotyping promises to use a piece of hair or skin left at a crime scene to infer an unknown person’s physical characteristics like eye color, nose shape, and cheekbone width. A groundbreaking new study — featured in last week’s Nature, New Scientist, and Time Magazine — used high-resolution 3D images and facial recognition software to approximate the facial features of almost 600 people of mixed ancestry from their DNA.

I consider the scientific, constitutional, and criminological implications of this technology in The Second Generation of Racial Profiling. I argue that reliable DNA phenotyping would force us to rethink whether race-based suspect descriptions are the kind of racially classifying state action subject to strict scrutiny–and it would lean on the narrow tailoring requirement that the state use race-neutral alternatives when possible. I summarized my replies to the best policy objections in a short piece on The Future of Genetic Privacy:

Critics of the forensic technique argue that its adoption would imperil individual privacy and facilitate racial profiling. These objections are important, but they’re overstated. What “a person knowingly exposes to the public,” the Supreme Court has held, “is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection” against unreasonable searches and seizures. And statutory safeguards could be afforded for sensitive external traits about whether a suspect has changed genders, for example, or had plastic surgery.

Racial profiling is another concern. That the technology could be used to target minorities at disproportionate rates, however, gives no reason to think that such misuse is probable or any more likely than DNA dragnets or stop-and-question sweeps based on race-based suspect descriptions. The adoption of more precise physical markers in place of notoriously unreliable eyewitness observation would improve arrest accuracy and enhance police legitimacy.

The more serious worry is that DNA phenotyping might resurrect discredited conceptions of racial biology. If the [National Institute of Justice-funded] technology works as well as the government is banking it will, however, then replacing race-based suspect designations with the colors and shapes of facial features could, to the contrary, loosen the hold that race has on the way that people think about crime. Today’s all-points-bulletin for a “black man” could give way to tomorrow’s search for a suspect with dimples, copper complexion, and green eyes.

Wouldn’t police just filter these markers into racial terms? Maybe not, if they’re trained like clerks at a makeup counter are to trade in racial identifiers for face shapes and color tones. Besides, measures short of prohibition would likely soften whatever risk the adoption of DNA phenotyping would pose to egalitarian norms — for example, requiring higher burdens for investigatory use, or racial impact assessments of the kind that gained national prominence after the Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act.

Dov Fox quoted on pre-natal DNA testing

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Dov Fox is quoted in a story in this morning’s Boston Globe on a new study recommending pre-natal DNA testing as a superior method for detecting chromosomal abnormalities in a fetus. 

“This technology is certainly only in its infancy as the range of testable conditions expands, physical conditions, cognitive conditions, even behavioral ones,” said Dov Fox, an assistant professor of law at the University of San Diego School of Law. “That will only further complicate how parents decide what counts as healthy or acceptable in the children that they have.”

Read the full article.