Tag: gun control

Supreme Court of the United States.

Overhauling our Federal Courts to Preserve and Advance Public Health

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Sarah Wetter and Lawrence O. Gostin

In the Federalist No. 78, Alexander Hamilton called judicial independence “the best expedient which can be devised in any government to secure a steady, upright, and impartial administration of the laws.” Judicial independence is also critical for public health. Over the last century, courts have affirmed broad public health powers and established modern health-related rights. Yet in a significant departure from history, today’s federal courts have been far from impartial, issuing ideology-driven decisions that will resound for decades to come, with harmful public health consequences.

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Hospital beds in a room filled with smoke.

The End of Public Health? An Introduction to the Symposium

Jennifer S. Bard Leave a comment

By Jennifer S. Bard

Teaching public health law over these past three years has meant contending with a series of federal and state court rulings that in different ways have called into question many of what seemed to be the most established principles of public health law. The double whammy of the pandemic and a new, and very different Supreme Court have already resulted in more dramatic changes to public health law in the past few years than in the preceding one hundred plus years.

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Woman surfing.

#MedBikini and Social Media Peer Review

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Louise P. King

Recently, #MedTwitter was awash with pictures of medical professionals in bikinis as a unique and effective protest to a flawed, and now retracted, journal article.

Those posting objected to the methods used and implicit bias contained in a recently published article in the Journal of Vascular Surgery. The authors replicated the methods and conclusions of a prior 2014 study, which did not garner the same attention at the time.

In both studies, various authors from different branches of surgery created fake accounts on social media and then used Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) lists of residents to scrutinize their public profiles for evidence of “unprofessional” conduct. Each of these studies was presented at a national meeting.

But having men create fake accounts to then secretly monitor residents’ social media profiles for what they personally find objectionable is not scientifically rigorous, and itself represents unprofessional behavior.

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