The Petrie-Flom Center is excited to announce our affiliated researchers for the Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation (POPLAR) and our new project, Psychedelic Use, Law, and Spiritual Experience (PULSE). Through research, writing, workshops, and other projects, POPLAR and PULSE affiliated researchers will provide expertise and a range of perspectives on psychedelics law and policy. We look forward to learning from them and sharing their insights with our audiences.
Tag: Health Law
Supreme Court Preview: Key Health Law Issues for the 2024 Term
This post launches a new Digital Symposium: Supreme Court Preview: Key Health Law Issues for the 2024 Term, guest edited by Cary Franklin, Professor of Law, McDonald/Wright Chair of Law, and Faculty Director of the Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy and the Williams Institute at UCLA Law; and Lindsay F. Wiley, Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Health Law and Policy Program at UCLA Law.
by Cary Franklin and Lindsay F. Wiley
The Supreme Court’s decisions have important and long-lasting effects on health care access, the public’s health, health equity, and the power of communities to create healthier living and working conditions. In the days leading up to the Court’s 2024 term, this symposium explores how the Court is dramatically restructuring individual rights and governmental and private institutional powers and responsibilities related to health.
The Impetus for a Neutered Chevron
by Barbara Pfeffer Billauer
Legal pundits are predicting the imminent demise (or at least substantial enfeeblement) of the Chevron doctrine. Until recently, that case afforded substantial judicial deference to decisions made by administrative agencies if a statutory provision under its purview was ambiguous. Now two cases are before the Supreme Court challenging an agency interpretation regarding funding of statutorily required monitors on fishing boats. This development signals a “sea-change” is in sight for agency autonomy, as deference to agency decisions is being threatened.
Stephanie Tabashneck: An “Interpreter” Between Two Fields
Stephanie Tabashneck, PsyD, JD, is a Senior Fellow in Law and Applied Neuroscience at the Petrie-Flom Center and Center for Law, Brain and Behavior (CLBB) at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School. A forensic psychologist and an attorney, she focuses her research, practice, and teaching on neural development in children and adolescents, substance use issues, and providing forensic evaluations and expert testimony. This Q&A, which has been condensed and edited for clarity, offers a glimpse into Dr. Tabashneck’s wide-ranging and dynamic career.
Routing Back to Roe in Light of Adverse State Supreme Court Abortion Decisions
By James G. Hodge, Jr. and Jennifer L. Piatt
Surrounding the U.S. Supreme Court’s withdrawal of the longstanding constitutional right to abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization on June 24, 2022, multiple state supreme courts have done their own “about face” on reproductive rights. Motivated perhaps by the infamous leaked decision in Dobbs, the Iowa Supreme Court reversed its 2018 decision finding abortion protections in the state constitution, concluding on June 17, 2022 that no such fundamental right exists. Following a January 2023 decision rejecting a 6-week statutory ban as violating the state’s constitution, a reconstituted South Carolina Supreme Court found the ban constitutional in August 2023. Florida’s Supreme Court protected abortion as a fundamental privacy right under the state constitution in 1989 only to reverse its view on April 1, 2024.
Most recently, on April 9, 2024 a majority of the Arizona Supreme Court resurrected an 1864 territorial law banning all abortions except to save the life of the pregnant woman in Planned Parenthood v. Hazelrigg. That decision thrust Arizona into the realm of 14 other states with the most stringent restrictions nationally – no abortions with virtually no exceptions.
Eight Opportunities to Use the Law to Address Social Determinants of Health
By Jon Larsen and Sterling Johnson
Addressing the opioid crisis cannot stop at providing better access to treatment for opioid use disorder (OUD), expanding and enhancing harm reduction efforts, and reimagining the role of law enforcement, as explored previously in this blog series. The response must go further to make treatment and harm reduction more effective, by acknowledging the opioid epidemic as a reflection of the conditions of the whole society, identifying those conditions, and addressing them head-on. A whole-person response to OUD and other substance use disorders needs a well-coordinated whole-of-government response to address myriad societal issues that are critical to effective drug treatment, including, but not limited to, housing, education, economic development, and tax policy.
Conclusion to the Symposium: From Principles to Practice: Human Rights and Public Health Emergencies
By Timothy Fish Hodgson, Roojin Habibi, and Alicia Ely Yamin
In developing the digital symposium, From Principles to Practice: Human Rights and Public Health Emergencies (which ran from October – December 2023), as editors we endeavored to get scholars, human rights advocates, judges, and policy makers to engage critically with the expert Principles and Guidelines on Human Rights and Public Health Emergencies (the PHE Principles), published by the International Commission of Jurists and the Global Health Law Consortium in May 2023. In doing so, we encouraged contributors to comment on the Principles’ potential usefulness as guidance in addressing real emergency situations, as well as any possible gaps and weaknesses.
While summarizing the entire content of the 13 blogs comprising this symposium in any depth is not possible here, this concluding post will attempt to synthesize some of the major inputs from the contributions. We also provide some of our own observations, as participants in the drafting of the Principles, with the aim of pushing the discussion prompted by the posts forward.
Six Opportunities to Use the Law to Support Harm Reduction
By Jon Larsen and Sterling Johnson
Harm reduction in the context of the opioid crisis is focused on preventing overdose and infectious disease transmission by working with people who use drugs without moral judgment. Far too often, the public health imperative of harm reduction is blocked by federal policy, state laws, and other structural barriers anchored in the “war on drugs” that reduce the effectiveness of harm reduction efforts. To maximize the potential of harm reduction requires a whole-of-government approach, involving coordination across levels of government.
As noted in this recent report, “Bringing the W-G approach to bear on a complex problem depends on several components, including agreement as to the problem, understanding the problem, and the causes of the problem. For many involved in government at all levels, the harm reduction challenge unfortunately falls at the first of those hurdles.”
Introducing the Global Health and Rights Project’s New Affiliated Researchers
(Clockwise from top left: Daniela Cepeda Cuadrado, Lucía Berro Pizzarossa, Natalia Pires de Vasconcelos, Thalia Viveros Uehara)
The Petrie-Flom Center is excited to welcome four new affiliated researchers to the Global Health and Rights Project (GHRP).
Through regular contributions to Bill of Health, as well as workshops and other projects, GHRP affiliated researchers will bring their expertise to bear on both national and global problems, advancing critical socio-legal scholarship both within and beyond Latin America. We look forward to learning from and sharing their insights with a wider audience, and to contributing to enlarging international networks of critical praxis in global health and human rights.
Seven Opportunities to Use the Law to Address Drug Policing
By Jon Larsen and Sterling Johnson
There is a well-established whole of government response to drug policing centered around the “war on drugs.” However, the existing response is largely built on flawed policies that have resulted in mass incarceration, structural racism, and lagging improvements in treatment and harm reduction related to the opioid crisis. Policy changes must be considered to replace acknowledged failures and reimagine the whole of government response to drug policing.
With support from the Foundation for Opioid Response Efforts (FORE), public health law experts from Indiana University McKinney School of Law and the Temple University Center for Public Health Law Research at the Beasley School of Law recently embarked on a systematic review of US drug policy using a whole-of-government (W-G) approach to assess where these misalignments are occurring among different agencies at the same level of government (referred to as horizontal W-G), and across different levels of government (referred to as vertical W-G). It ultimately provides a tool to address these misalignments directly.