Call for Abstracts: Emerging Issues and New Frontiers for FDA Regulation

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The Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School and the Food and Drug Law Institute are pleased to announce an upcoming collaborative academic symposium:

Emerging Issues and New Frontiers for FDA Regulation

Monday, October 20, 2014 

Washington, DC

We are currently seeking abstracts for academic presentations/papers on the following topics:

  • Stem cell therapies
  • Nanotechnologies
  • Genetic (and biomarker) tests
  • Gene therapies
  • Personalized medicine
  • Comparative efficacy research
  • Drug resistant pathogens
  • Globalized markets
  • Tobacco
  • GMO
  • Bioterrorism countermeasures
  • Mobile health technologies
  • Health IT
  • Drug shortages
  • Other related topics

Abstracts should be no longer than 1 page, and should be emailed to Davina Rosen Marano at dsr@fdli.org by Tuesday, June 3, 2014. Questions should also be directed to Davina Rosen Marano.

We will notify selected participants by the end of June.  Selected participants will present at the symposium, and will be expected to submit a completed article by December 15, 2014 (after the event) to be considered for publication in a 2015 issue of FDLI’s Food and Drug Law Journal (FDLJ).  Publication decisions will be made based on usual FDLJ standards.

CFP: CLE/CEU symposium on outstanding challenges in healthcare reform implementation

With the help of Medica Health Plans, the Health Law Institute at Hamline University School of Law and the Hamline Law Review seek proposals for presentations and papers for our all-day CLE/CEU Symposium that will examine the outstanding challenges confronting the implementation of healthcare reform.  The Symposium will take place on Friday, October 24, 2014, at Hamline University’s main campus in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Anyone interested in speaking at the Symposium and/or publishing in the Hamline Law Review’s Symposium issue should submit both a CV and a 500-word abstract to healthlaw@hamline.edu by April 15, 2014.  While the primary focus of the presentation or paper need not be Minnesota-specific, please explain the regional relevance of your topic and thesis.

Additional information can be found here. Please feel free to share this information with anyone you think may be interested.

Global Health Governance: Call for Submissions

Global Health Governance will be publishing a special issue on a proposed Framework Convention on Global Health (FCGH) in December 2014. The proposal for an FCGH would create a new international framework, grounded in the international human right to health, that would support health at the national and global levels.

For this FCGH special issue, Global Health Governance invites submission of theoretical and empirical policy research articles that examine and analyze how the FCGH could improve health through improved governance and realization of the right to health. We have particular interest in articles on: Read More

DUE MONDAY: Call for Abstracts for Petrie-Flom Center 2014 Annual Conference

The Petrie-Flom Center invites abstracts for its 2014 Annual Conference: “Behavioral Economics, Law, and Health Policy.” The conference will be held at Harvard Law School on May 2 and 3, 2014, and seeks to address the following questions:

  • Are there features unique to health and health care that prevent individuals, groups, and policymakers from making the best decisions?  What is a “best” decision, i.e., whose perspective should be paramount?
  • What types of barriers exist to rational decision making in the health care context, and what does rational decision making look like here?
  • Is exploitation of framing effects, default rules, nudges, and other elements of choice architecture appropriate when it comes to human health, or is this an area where pure autonomy should reign – or perhaps strong paternalism is needed? Is health policy special?
  • What should policymakers do when there is conflict between outcomes that might be good for individuals but not society more generally, and vice versa?  Where should the nudges push?
  • Which areas of health law, bioethics, and biotechnology policy are most amenable or resistant to manipulation of choice architecture?  When nudges are not plausible, what is the best way to overcome bounded rationality?
  • When might behavioral economics lead to the wrong results for health law, bioethics, and biotechnology policy?
  • How can manipulations of choice architecture be best evaluated empirically, and what ethical concerns might such research raise?
  • What are the most interesting or compelling health law, bioethics, and biotechnology policy nudges we should be thinking about today in the realms of obesity, organ donation, end-of-life care, biospecimen ownership and research, human subjects research, HIV testing, vaccination, health insurance, and other areas?

Please note that this list is not meant to be at all exhaustive; we hope to receive papers related to the conference’s general theme but not specifically listed here.

Calls for abstracts are due by December 2, 2013.

For a full conference description, including the call for abstracts and registration information, please visit our website.

Behavioral Economics for Health Law

By Christopher Robertson

This year, the PFC’s annual conference will focus on “Behavioral Economics, Law, and Health Policy” (the call for abstracts deadline is next week).   Apropos, last week, Reuters featured a story by Jill Priluck “The Overselling of Behavioral Economics,” which itself seems to be a press release for a new article by NYU’s Rick Pildes and Ryan Bubb, called “How Behavioral Economics Trims its Sails and Why.”  In several fields, including consumer finance, Pildes and Bubb chronicle examples where policymakers tried to put behavioral economics principles into practice, and seem to have failed to produce desired results or have caused unintended consequences.  Some of their examples are controversial (in terms of both the interventions tried and the success of the outcomes), but those points are best addressed by the experts in those fields.

As health law considers its relationship to behavioral economics, I think a larger point is in order.  Allow me to be provocative: there is no such thing as behavioral economics.

Instead, the core of what we have called “behavioral economics” is just a set of observations (usually from lab experiments) where idealized and assumption-laden economic models have failed to actually predict human behavior.  At least at this stage of its development, behavioral economics is best understood as a negative project, not a positive one.   Of course, we do put labels on those documented failures like “regret aversion” or “social norming” or “optimism bias,” and it is then tempting to make things out of those labels.  Instead, when the limits of those simplistic economic models are found, that should simply return social scientists and policymakers to a domain of open-minded common sense about how people will actually behave when we take them outside the lab and try to regulate them.

While the behavioral economics literature does provide its own theoretical frameworks, which can generate new hypotheses, the best teaching of behavioral economics is simply fallibilism and empiricism.  That is why the “Nudge Unit” (aka Behavioral Insights Team) in the United Kingdom has prioritized the use of randomized experimentation to evaluate every “nudge” that it tries, and the sister initiative here in the United States is doing likewise.  I am optimistic of that approach.

DUE IN ONE WEEK: Call for Abstracts for Petrie-Flom Center 2014 Annual Conference

The Petrie-Flom Center invites abstracts for its 2014 Annual Conference: “Behavioral Economics, Law, and Health Policy.” The conference will be held at Harvard Law School on May 2 and 3, 2014, and seeks to address the following questions:

  • Are there features unique to health and health care that prevent individuals, groups, and policymakers from making the best decisions?  What is a “best” decision, i.e., whose perspective should be paramount?
  • What types of barriers exist to rational decision making in the health care context, and what does rational decision making look like here?
  • Is exploitation of framing effects, default rules, nudges, and other elements of choice architecture appropriate when it comes to human health, or is this an area where pure autonomy should reign – or perhaps strong paternalism is needed? Is health policy special?
  • What should policymakers do when there is conflict between outcomes that might be good for individuals but not society more generally, and vice versa?  Where should the nudges push?
  • Which areas of health law, bioethics, and biotechnology policy are most amenable or resistant to manipulation of choice architecture?  When nudges are not plausible, what is the best way to overcome bounded rationality?
  • When might behavioral economics lead to the wrong results for health law, bioethics, and biotechnology policy?
  • How can manipulations of choice architecture be best evaluated empirically, and what ethical concerns might such research raise?
  • What are the most interesting or compelling health law, bioethics, and biotechnology policy nudges we should be thinking about today in the realms of obesity, organ donation, end-of-life care, biospecimen ownership and research, human subjects research, HIV testing, vaccination, health insurance, and other areas?

Please note that this list is not meant to be at all exhaustive; we hope to receive papers related to the conference’s general theme but not specifically listed here.

Abstracts are due by December 2, 2013.

For a full conference description, including the call for abstracts and registration information, please visit our website.

Call for Abstracts, Petrie-Flom Center 2014 Annual Conference

The Petrie-Flom Center invites abstracts for its 2014 Annual Conference: “Behavioral Economics, Law, and Health Policy.” The conference will be held at Harvard Law School on May 2 and 3, 2014, and seeks to address the following questions:

  • Are there features unique to health and health care that prevent individuals, groups, and policymakers from making the best decisions?  What is a “best” decision, i.e., whose perspective should be paramount?
  • What types of barriers exist to rational decision making in the health care context, and what does rational decision making look like here?
  • Is exploitation of framing effects, default rules, nudges, and other elements of choice architecture appropriate when it comes to human health, or is this an area where pure autonomy should reign – or perhaps strong paternalism is needed? Is health policy special?
  • What should policymakers do when there is conflict between outcomes that might be good for individuals but not society more generally, and vice versa?  Where should the nudges push?
  • Which areas of health law, bioethics, and biotechnology policy are most amenable or resistant to manipulation of choice architecture?  When nudges are not plausible, what is the best way to overcome bounded rationality?
  • When might behavioral economics lead to the wrong results for health law, bioethics, and biotechnology policy?
  • How can manipulations of choice architecture be best evaluated empirically, and what ethical concerns might such research raise?
  • What are the most interesting or compelling health law, bioethics, and biotechnology policy nudges we should be thinking about today in the realms of obesity, organ donation, end-of-life care, biospecimen ownership and research, human subjects research, HIV testing, vaccination, health insurance, and other areas?

Please note that this list is not meant to be at all exhaustive; we hope to receive papers related to the conference’s general theme but not specifically listed here.

Abstracts are due by December 2, 2013.

For a full conference description, including the call for abstracts and registration information, please visit our website.

CFP: Perspectives on Abortion, Assisted Reproductive Technologies, and Judicial Review

Call for Papers: Intersections in Reproduction:

Perspectives on Abortion, Assisted Reproductive Technologies,

and Judicial Review

Abortion and reproductive technologies have historically occupied separate realms in law, policy, and academia. In spite of some obvious and natural overlap, scholarship exploring the relationship between abortion and assisted reproduction is sparse. In 2014, Judith Daar (Whittier Law School) and Kimberly Mutcherson (Rutgers Law-Camden) will co-guest edit an issue of the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics devoted to articles reflecting on this relationship. JLME is a peer-reviewed journal published by the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics.

The guest editors are open to a wide range of scholarship from authors steeped in various aspects of reproductive justice, reproductive rights and reproductive technologies who can explore the future of assisted reproduction and abortion as matters of scholarly concern and legal regulation, especially when viewed as part of a larger movement for reproductive rights and reproductive justice. The term reproductive technologies should be interpreted broadly in this context to go beyond IVF and include a range of techniques used in conjunction with assisted methods of conception.

Questions papers might choose to tackle include, but are in no way limited to:

Read More

Conference Announcement and Call for Abstracts, 2014 Petrie-Flom Center Annual Conference

The Petrie-Flom Center has released the description and call for abstracts for its 2014 Annual Conference: “Behavioral Economics, Law, and Health Policy.” The conference will be held at Harvard Law School on May 2 and 3, 2014, and seeks to address the following questions:

  • Are there features unique to health and health care that prevent individuals, groups, and policymakers from making the best decisions?  What is a “best” decision, i.e., whose perspective should be paramount?
  • What types of barriers exist to rational decision making in the health care context, and what does rational decision making look like here?
  • Is exploitation of framing effects, default rules, nudges, and other elements of choice architecture appropriate when it comes to human health, or is this an area where pure autonomy should reign – or perhaps strong paternalism is needed? Is health policy special?
  • What should policymakers do when there is conflict between outcomes that might be good for individuals but not society more generally, and vice versa?  Where should the nudges push?
  • Which areas of health law, bioethics, and biotechnology policy are most amenable or resistant to manipulation of choice architecture?  When nudges are not plausible, what is the best way to overcome bounded rationality?
  • When might behavioral economics lead to the wrong results for health law, bioethics, and biotechnology policy?
  • How can manipulations of choice architecture be best evaluated empirically, and what ethical concerns might such research raise?
  • What are the most interesting or compelling health law, bioethics, and biotechnology policy nudges we should be thinking about today in the realms of obesity, organ donation, end-of-life care, biospecimen ownership and research, human subjects research, HIV testing, vaccination, health insurance, and other areas?

Please note that this list is not meant to be at all exhaustive; we hope to receive papers related to the conference’s general theme but not specifically listed here.

Abstracts are due by December 2, 2013.

For a full conference description, including the call for abstracts and registration information, please visit our website.

Call for Papers on “Buying and Selling Health Care”

The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics plans to publish a symposium issue in Winter 2014 exploring ethical, legal, and clinical issues triggered by the increasing commercialization of health care in the United States. The symposium will address a variety of dynamics present in this quintessentially American medical marketplace, with a particular focus on how commercialism impacts practitioners, patients, and policy makers at all levels.

Papers from any perspective or disciplinary background and concerning any aspect of the “buying and selling of health care” are welcome.

Deadlines and submission instructions below the fold.

Read More