Tag: New Mexico

Los Angeles, California / USA - May 1, 2020: People in front of Los Angeles’ City Hall protest the state’s COVID-19 stay at home orders in a “Fully Open California” protest.

Social Distancing, Social Protest, and the Social Constitution of a New Body of Law

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Lindsay F. Wiley

COVID-19 mitigation orders, court decisions adjudicating challenges to them, and legislation adopted to constrain similar orders in the future are constituting a new body of law governing social distancing.

The emerging law of social distancing is vital to the future of public health. It also offers more general lessons about how law interacts with individual behavior, social norms, and social contestation of what we owe each other as members of a community.

Social protests — including massive protests for racial justice and against police violence as well as much smaller anti-lockdown protests — are playing an important role in these developments.

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Doctors Conducting Peer Review Can Recover Compensatory and Punitive Damages for Confidentiality Violations

astein Leave a comment

By Alex Stein

The Supreme Court of New Mexico has recently delivered an important decision protecting peer reviewers’ statutory entitlement to confidentiality. Yedidag v. Roswell Clinic Corp., — P.3d —- (N.M. 2015), 2015 WL 691333. The Court ruled that peer reviewers can sue violators of their confidentiality right and recover compensatory and even punitive damages. This ruling applied the common law criteria for identifying statutory violations as a breach of contract. Based on those criteria, the Court categorized peer reviewers as members of the class protected by the peer review statute, who deserve remedies for violations of their confidentiality right. The Court also estimated that the criminal penalty imposed by the statute on the right’s violators was too lenient to discourage violations. The Court projected that allowing peer reviewers to sue violators will compensate for the resulting shortfall in deterrence. As a conceptual matter, the Court decided that peer reviewers’ confidentiality entitlement is a “mandatory rule of law incorporated into physician-reviewer employment contracts.” Read More