Health Law & Policy

What if the government forced all citizens to get genetic testing to find out if they were carriers of a deadly disease such as Tay-Sachs? “Any constitutional problem with that?” I. Glenn Cohen ’03 asks the 25 students in his popular course, Genetics and Reproductive Technology: Legal and Ethical Issues, as he paces before the blackboard in a Hauser classroom.

Two more HLS alumni have been named to high-level posts in the Obama Administration. Nancy-Ann DeParle ’83 has been appointed director of the White House Office for Health Reform, and Jeremy Bash ’98 will be CIA Director Leon Panetta’s chief of staff.

Staff and students from the WilmerHale Legal Services Center’s Health Law Clinic attended this year’s United States Conference on AIDS last month, where they introduced and described their new program to educate the public about the current state of health care law.

Assistant Professors I. Glenn Cohen '03, Adriaan Lanni, Jed Shugerman, and Matthew Stephenson '03 each had papers selected for the ninth annual Stanford-Yale Junior Faculty Forum, which will take place at Yale Law School in June.

A hard hat sits on a bookshelf in her office. It's a requirement for visiting the construction site across from the Dimock Community Health Center, but the prop fits Ruth Ellen Fitch '83, the center's president and CEO, in more ways than one.

Twenty-six years ago, Peter Ferrara '79 picked a then obscure topic for his third-year paper: Social Security solvency.

AIDS, malaria and malnutrition claim millions of lives in the developing world every year. One approach to such problems is to provide free health products--condoms, malaria kits and vitamin supplements--to health clinics.

Drug use is down over the last 25 years, but a half million Americans are in prison for drug offenses. How should success be measured?

A sampling from this year's crop of 3L papers.

This winter, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in a tug-of-war between the states and the federal government over drug policy. We asked constitutional law expert Professor Richard H. Fallon to predict how the Court will rule.

The new battle against fast food has found an important ally in Richard Daynard '67, president of the Tobacco Control Resource Center at Northeastern University School of Law.

Not many people have to specify that they don't think it's a good thing that cigarettes kill people. But W. Kip Viscusi mentions it nonetheless because his work--and its subject matter--can be oversimplified, he says. Not to mention vilified.

Ira Burnim's clients are not like the rest of us. They don't want any help. They're just not worth the money, the time, the trouble. They're better off locked away, out of sight.

In their new book, excerpted below, Martha A. Field and Valerie A. Sanchez present their views of American legal doctrine and social policies that have influenced and still govern procreation and parenting by persons with retardation.