This course examines legal and ethical issues in medical treatment and research, with an emphasis on the relationship between bioethical analysis and legal decision-making. Topics covered include medical decision-making at the end of life, organ transplantation, the determination of death, research involving human participants, sterilization of mentally incompetent persons, maternal-fetal decision-making, and assisted reproduction. The course will emphasize bioethical issues relevant to all stages of the life cycle, with a particular focus on issues concerning children and adolescents.
*Students may write a seminar paper in this course to fulfill the AWR requirement, or they may elect to complete a take-home exam rather than an AWR paper.
This seminar examines cutting edge and controversial linkages between law and neuroscience. The seminar aims to highlight neuroscientific basis for behavior patterns with legal implications, including how neuroscience intersects with civil law, criminal law, evidentiary rules, memory bias and enhancement, lie and deception detection, adolescent brains and juvenile law. We will look critically at efforts to use neuroimaging in court in connection with predictions of dangerousness and predispositions towards mental illness and substance use and misuse, as well as efforts to identify neurobiological influences on the brain. Does it make sense to speak of the neurobiology of violence or the psychopathology of crime, or future dangerousness? This course will explore the relationship between law and science, more generally, and neuroscience in particular.
This seminar introduces students to the various examples of enterprise risk confronting the pharmaceutical manufacturer and the independent and overlapping obligations imposed by government regulations, health care compliance statutes, and tort liability.
The course will include a study of a broad range of laws, regulations and policies that impact these forms of risk, including the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, federal and state False Claims Acts, Anti-kickback statutes, and various product liability and Lanham Act cases. Students will learn to identify potential risk areas and consider mitigation strategies in representation of pharmaceutical companies in the evolving environment of regulatory, compliance and liability oversight.
The course is graded High Pass, Pass, D, or Fail based on attendance, class participation, preparation for simulations, and writing assignments; there will not be a final examination. To maximize synergy between classroom and real world practice experiences, students are required to secure (or to have completed) a health law externship or other similar health law placement approved by the Health Law Program by the first week of classes. Pre- or Co-requisite: Health Law.