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Mourning the Loss of Professor Bo Burt

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By Abbe Gluck

Yale Law School and so many others in the medical-legal community mourn the sudden passing of our colleague and friend, Robert (“Bo”) Burt.  As many readers of this blog know, Bo was an early pioneer in thinking about doctor-patient relationships and the hardest questions about the end of life. He worked for years on the Soros Project, Death in America, and authored numerous books, including In the Whirlwind: God and Humanity in Conflict (Harvard Univ. Press, 2012); Death is That Man Taking Names: Intersections of American Medicine, Law and Culture (Univ. of California Press and the Milbank Memorial Fund, 2002); and Taking Care of Strangers: The Rule of Law in Doctor-Patient Relations (Free Press, 1979). His YLS obituary is here.  He will be sorely missed and always remembered.

Obamacare and States Rights: on the same side of the line this time, in King v. Burwell

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By Abbe Gluck

Next week the Court hears a major challenge to Obamacare, King v. Burwell. Readers of this blog know the case has deep importance for health care. But it also is a big case for law. I have previously detailed why the case is the big test for the Court’s current text-oriented statutory-interpretation philosophy known as textualism. Today, in Politico, I explain why the case is also fundamentally about state rights. The question is whether the Court’s many federalism-protecting doctrines–which, let’s not forget, the Court applied against the Government in the last Obamacare case–whether those federalism doctrines, like the Court’s textualist rules, are sufficiently legitimate and objective such they will apply regardless of which side they happen to support, even in a case as politicized as this one. After all, isn’t that the point of having a rule of law in the first place?

Here is an excerpt and a link. Read More