The Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics is pleased to announce our 2025 annual conference: “Law, Healthcare, and the Aging Brain and Body.” This year’s conference is organized in collaboration with Nina A. Kohn, the David M. Levy Professor of Law at Syracuse University College of Law and the Solomon Center Distinguished Scholar in Elder Law with the Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy at Yale Law School and Francis X. Shen, Professor of Law, Solly Robbins Distinguished Research Fellow, and Faculty Member in the Graduate Program in Neuroscience at the University of Minnesota, with assistance from Caitlyn Tabor from the Center for Law, Brain, and Behavior.
Category: I. Glenn Cohen
The Leaked Dobbs Opinion, Explained
By Chloe Reichel
On May 2, 2022, Politico published a leaked draft of the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which showed the Supreme Court’s intent to overturn the right to abortion as decided in Roe v. Wade.
In response to the leak, the Petrie-Flom Center hosted a discussion with legal historian and Daniel P.S. Paul Visiting Professor of Constitutional Law Mary Ziegler and Petrie-Flom Center Faculty Director, James A. Attwood and Leslie Williams Professor of Law, and Deputy Dean I. Glenn Cohen.
Together, Cohen and Ziegler explained the background of the case, the contents of the draft opinion, and its potential implications not just for abortion access, but also for other constitutionally-protected rights, and for access to reproductive technologies, such as in-vitro fertilization.
The highlights of the conversation have been edited and condensed below.
Most-Cited Health Law Scholars in Westlaw, 2016-2020
By Mark A. Hall and I. Glenn Cohen
A few years ago, to highlight the growth and maturity of the health law field we undertook to measure and rank the scholarly impact of health law professors according to the frequency their work is cited. Our principal ranking followed the methods Gregory Sisk and Brian Leiter have used for many years to rank professors in other fields of law.
Leiter has now included Health Law in the pantheon of ranked legal fields. Accordingly, we will not undertake an independent ranking. Instead, because the data Sisk and Leiter use are restricted to professors with a primary law school appointment, we provide the following modest supplement: We replicate Sisk and Leiter’s citation counting methods for two health law professors known to be highly cited who do not have a primary law school appointment: Aaron Kesselheim and Sara Rosenbaum. (We did the same for several others, but their citation counts in the Westlaw database were below Leiter’s cutoff range). Here is the augmented ranking:
The Many Harms of State Bills Blocking Youth Access to Gender-Affirming Care
By Chloe Reichel
State legislation blocking trans youth from accessing gender-affirming care puts kids at risk, thwarts physician autonomy, and potentially violates a number of federal laws, write Jack L. Turban, Katherine L. Kraschel, and I. Glenn Cohen in a viewpoint published today in JAMA.
So far this year, 15 states have proposed bills that would limit access to gender-affirming care. One of these bills, Arkansas’ HB1570/SB347, already has become law.
This legislative trend should be troubling to all, explained Cohen, Faculty Director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. In an email interview, he highlighted “how exceptionally restrictive these proposed laws are,” adding that they are “out of step with usual medical, ethical, and legal rules regarding discretion of the medical profession and space for parental decision-making.”
Turban, child and adolescent psychiatry fellow at Stanford University School of Medicine also offered further insight as to the medical and legal concerns these bills raise over email.
Key Takeaways from Petrie-Flom Center Discussion on Vaccine Passports
As mask mandates fall to the wayside, COVID-19 digital health passes, often called vaccine passports, hold promise as a tool to verify whether individuals may enter a space without a face covering.
Vaccine passports, however, also pose a number of ethical and legal challenges. Panelists discussed these concerns during an April 28 webinar hosted by the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics titled, “Vaccine Passports: A Path to the New Normal?”
This article highlights key points made during the conversation.
Can Colleges and Universities Require Student COVID-19 Vaccination?
This post originally appeared on the Harvard Law Review Blog.
By I. Glenn Cohen and Dorit Rubinstein Reiss
In the last year, colleges and universities across the U.S. struggled with how to operate during the COVID-19 pandemic. The most recent data, from January 2021, shows a mix of online and in-person modes of instruction.
At the same time, a study of the experience in early fall 2020 found an association between colleges and universities with in-person instruction and increased infection incidence in the counties within which the schools were located. With vaccine authorization in the U.S. and the promise of potential availability for student populations in late spring and summer 2021 (in most states’ allocation plans these students are among the last groups in prioritization), there is increasing interest by higher education institutions in moving more of their fall 2021 educational instruction and non-instructional activities to in-person modes. Vaccinating students is a key step to safely reopening campuses, in whole or in part, in a way that is safe for students, faculty, staff, and local communities. At the same time, university leaders are likely reasonably concerned about the legality of mandating COVID-19 vaccines. Not all students, faculty or staff may appreciate such a requirement, and anti-vaccine groups are more than ready to assist in litigation — as, for example, they did when the University of California required influenza vaccines for on-campus attendance (a preliminary injunction in that case was denied). In this essay, we discuss whether universities can legally require vaccination as a condition of attendance and with what accommodations.
Interview with Glenn Cohen
By Annie Kapnick
Now that Pfizer and Moderna have begun distributing their COVID-19 vaccines to hospitals across the U.S., a new question has gained national attention — how will the vaccine be allocated?
TWIHL: Innovation and Protection: The Future of Medical Device Regulation, Episode 1
This is the first of three episodes of “Innovation and Protection: The Future of Medical Device Regulation,” a podcast miniseries created to replace the 2020 Petrie-Flom Center Annual Conference in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Eighth Annual Health Law Year in P/Review: Looking Back & Reaching Ahead
This post is part of our Eighth Annual Health Law Year in P/Review symposium. You can read all of the posts in the series here. Review the conference’s full agenda and register for the event on the Petrie-Flom Center’s website.
By Prof. I. Glenn Cohen and Kaitlyn Dowling
The Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics is excited to host the Eighth Annual Health Law Year in P/Review to be held at Harvard Law School December 6, 2019. This one-day conference is free and open to the public and will convene leading experts across health law policy, health sciences, technology, and ethics to discuss major developments in the field over the past year and invites them to contemplate what 2020 may hold. This year’s event will focus on developments in health information technology, the challenge of increasing health care coverage, immigration, the 2020 election, gene editing, and drug pricing, among other topic areas.
As we come to the end of another year in health law, the event will give us both a post-mortem on the biggest trends in 2019 and also some predictions on what’s to come in 2020.
Among the topics we will discuss: Read More
The Right Lesson from the Google-Ascension Patient Privacy Story
By I. Glenn Cohen
As has been well reported in the media, there is a controversy brewing over nonprofit hospital chain Ascension sharing millions of patient records with Google for their project codenamed “Nightingale.” (very Batman, if you ask me!) Most of the discussion so far, and the answers have not yet become pellucid, concerns whether the hospital and Google complied with HIPAA.
This is important, don’t get me wrong, but it is important that conversation not ignore a more important question: Read More
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