HEALTH LAW

PENN LAW FACULTY

PENN LAW ADJUNCTS & LECTURERS

TOLL PUBLIC INTEREST CENTER PARTNERS AT PENN

POSSIBLE PRO BONO PLACEMENTS FOR STUDENTS INTERESTED IN HEALTH LAW INCLUDE:

AIDS Law Project of Pennsylvania
Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR)
Children's Hospital of Philadelphia Policy Lab
City of Philadelphia Law Department – Health & Adult Services; Heath & Human Services
Community Legal Services, Inc. – Elderly Law Project; Public Benefits; Chinatown Clinic
Department of Health & Human Services
Legal Clinic for the Disabled
New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, Inc.
New York Legal Assistance Group
Penn Biotech Group
Pennsylvania Health Law Project
Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia (PILCOP) – Children’s Health Care
Southeast Asian Mutual Assistance Coalition (SEAMAAC)
Trisomy 21 Program at CHOP
University of Pennsylvania Health System Center for Bioethics
University of Pennsylvania Office of the Vice President and General Counsel

Penn Law Courses

We live in an administrative state, populated by thousands of governmental bodies that collectively exercise pervasive authority over the entire economy and the lives of every American. Unlike courts, which enjoy explicit constitutional independence, administrative agencies constitute a constitutionally ambiguous "fourth branch of government." Also unlike courts, most agencies have authority to wield a wide variety of regulatory powers other than adjudication, including rulemaking, licensing, advice-giving, and prosecution. "Administrative law" is the body of constitutional, statutory, Executive, and "common law" principles that constrain and thereby seek to legitimate the exercise of these powers. This course will be a critical examination of these principles. Topics include: the place of agencies in our tripartite structure of government, the choice between rulemaking and adjudication as devices for making policy, procedural requirements for the exercise of various administrative powers, and judicial review of administrative decisions.

Familiarity with quantitative reasoning and statistics is increasingly an important part of a lawyer’s job. This course will prepare students to understand the use of and to apply quantitative tools from statistics, finance, and economics to problems of legal importance. Topics covered include decision analysis, hypothesis testing, linear regression, game theory, microeconomics, and finance. Legal applications include litigation, negotiation, environmental law, corporate law, criminal law, employment law, antitrust, and intellectual property. In addition to a main textbook, sources for course material are drawn from legal cases, scientific studies, and journal and newspaper articles. The goal of the course is for students to develop their quantitative intuition through practical application, including the use of computer tools such as Excel. No specific mathematics background is required, and students with little or no quantitative coursework are especially encouraged to take the course. Students with more extensive math or economics backgrounds should consult with the professor to determine whether the course is appropriate.

This seminar course will focus both on fundamental questions, including whether conceiving of rights for animals is appropriate, and on an understanding of the current legal and administrative means through which the relationship between humans and animals is regulated. We will discuss the fact that nonhuman animals are not legally “persons” and have no legal rights, per se, only limited legal “protections.” Discussion of animal “rights” will necessarily entail an examination of the sources and characteristics of fundamental rights, why animals have historically been denied them, and whether legal rights are appropriately limited to humans. Further, we will discuss whether, if any such rights were recognized, what nonhuman animals should be entitled to them and, if so, to which legal rights they should be entitled. The class will also consider such issues as establishing standing for animal suits, the definition of “animal” as applicable to anti-cruelty statutes and an analysis of the law and theory behind the protections afforded (or not afforded) animals under various federal and state laws. The focus will be on the status of animals as property, the doctrine of standing, and the nature of legal rights as applied to nonhuman animals. We will examine the content and enforcement of the Endangered Species Act, the Federal Animal Welfare Act and accompanying regulations. A research paper (or possibly a few short papers) will be required.

3 sem. hrs.
People affected by bipolar disorder, major unipolar depression, anxiety disorders, stress disorders, schizophrenia and other DSM-IV mental illnesses have rich and difficult moral lives. This includes lawyers, judges, physicians and other highly regarded professionals. Read their autobiographies and discover remarkable levels of moral and ethical engagement. This seminar will examine how moralists recommend that a just and caring society judge and respond to the harmful and offensive acts of people with mental conditions. The seminar will also examine how we can rethink moral agency and other basic moral concepts to account for the moral engagement by people with mental conditions. What services and opportunities will a just society offer persons affected by mental illness to enhance their moral agency? The required texts for the course include five books (three of them riveting memoirs written by accomplished professionals with serious mental conditions) and a compilation of readings assembled by Prof. Allen.

This course examines the interactions and conflicts between law and ethics in the context of reproduction, reproductive technology, family formation, and child rearing. In recent decades, regulators, lawmakers, ethicists, and others have struggled to understand and, in some cases, contain developments in how babies are made, how families are formed, and how parents care for their children. As evidenced by frequent media sensations such as the birth of mega multiples or women giving birth well past menopause, controversies regularly arise about advancing reproductive technologies. These debates take place in the social, political, and medical arenas with varying consequences for individuals and the larger society. During the semester, we will study how the law has responded to changes in family formation, babymaking, and child rearing. More specifically, we will grapple with the relationship between law and ethics and seek to determine whether the law of babymaking and child rearing is or should be ethical. Through a study of topics such as disputes over parentage for children created using technology, fetal rights, sex selection, and limitations on access to parenting, we will evaluate where law and ethics intertwine and where they depart from each other. While we will study cases and learn black letter law, the class will also focus squarely on ethics, particularly feminist bioethics, and how policymaking does and does not reflect the ethical imperatives in any given situation. The final grade will be based on performance on exercises conducted in and out of class, attendance, participation and a final paper.

Federal and state governments, and the U.S. public, are increasingly turning to cost-benefit analysis and risk assessment to guide rulemaking decisions and to set priorities among interventions intended to protect health, safety, environmental quality, homeland security, financial assets, etc. This course prepares students to critically evaluate risk and cost-benefit analyses, in order to help make decisions that are responsive to law, science, economics, and public values. Students will analyze recent and pending decisions by EPA, FDA, OSHA, and other agencies, to explore how analysis has informed or obscured important controversies, and how the courts have shaped both analysis and outcome. We will also discuss the art of crafting cost-effective controls, considering both traditional rulemaking and innovative proposals for new policy instruments. Required readings will include a mix of journal articles about methods of analysis and regulatory policy, along with close analysis of several major court decisions. The course instructor is an environmental health scientist, but the course will not require any particular science or math background. Rather, lectures and class discussion will emphasize insights the instructor gleaned during 10 years as the chief rulemaking official at OSHA and member of numerous EPA advisory committees, including many details of regulatory analyses, court decisions, and enforcement actions that are poorly captured in the public record. Because of the MLK holiday on January 18, there will be a first organizational class meeting scheduled for Friday, January 15th, 10:30-11:50 in Silverman Ground 48. Depending on the interests of the students who attend this meeting, the course content might be modified to emphasize topic areas of particular interest (e.g., bioethics aspects, scientific integrity and whistleblowing issues, specific regulatory controversies ongoing at the time of the course).

More product liability lawsuits are filed against prescription drug manufacturers than against all other industries combined. As one legal scholar put it, the pharmaceutical industry is now “in tobacco-land in terms of how much people hate it,” and drug product liability litigation is now a “growth industry.” This course will consider the theory and practice of such lawsuits before, and now after, the Supreme Court’s recent landmark decision in Wyeth v. Levine (2009). At the outset, we will focus on the similarities and differences between such litigation and other product liability cases, using the “Phen-Fen” cases tried by the instructor as a model, and on the special context of FDA regulation. We will then consider the legal principles governing such lawsuits, such as inadequate warning; the learned intermediary doctrine; and medical causation. As part of each class, we will review the manner in which the controlling issues were presented to a jury using the edited record of a recent pharma products trial. The course will also consider the practical application of these doctrines, including the problems when doctors are witnesses; discovery strategies; and techniques to present complex information to juries. For the final class, each student will prepare one portion of opposing opening statements, based on the edited trial record they have been reviewing, which will then be combined and presented by a few volunteers to a “jury” recruited from Philadelphia residents. No Prerequisite. Course Requirements: A “bench memo” due Week 8; a 6-7 page section of the final jury presentation due Week 12; class participation. No exam.

This course will explore a variety of topics related to the Food and Drug Administration and its oversight of prescription drugs, medical devices and food safety. The FDA is a crucial federal regulatory agency, with authority over more than a quarter of the consumer products sold in the United States. We will discuss the history and basic approval authority of the FDA over food safety and therapeutic products, along with specific focus on a number of emerging developments. The class dynamic will be a mixture of Socratic teaching and more interactive legal and policy discussion, and I expect all students in the course to take an active role in our critique and analysis of various FDA policies and issues throughout the semester. My intention is to offer students a choice of evaluation methods, either a self-scheduled “take away” final exam or a 20-25 page research paper on an FDA topic of your choosing. I may revisit the paper option if class enrollment is larger than expected, and will announce any changes to the paper option during the add/drop period. A small fraction of the grade will be based on class participation throughout the semester.

3 sem. hrs.
This course will examine the regulatory environment that surrounds the United States health care delivery and financing systems. It will explore how statutes, regulations, common law, and market forces help or hinder three major goals of policy makers: increasing access, reducing cost, and improving quality. Specific topics will include the regulation of health care quality, anti-fraud and abuse laws, the law and policy of health information technology, and health care reform. (While our discussion of health care regulation will necessarily touch on ethical questions, the course will not focus on bioethical issues; nor will it address pharmaceutical or medical device regulation.) Casebook readings will be supplemented by government publications, policy materials, and Atul Gawande's book, Complications: A Surgeon's Note on an Imperfect Science. Evaluation will be based on exam and class participation.

This seminar will examine recent debates in health law and policy through discussion of current events, proposed legislation, and scholarly articles in the legal, medical, and public policy literatures. Weekly topics will depend in part on student interest, but will likely include federal health care reform, malpractice liability reform, obesity, health disparities, regulation of pharmaceutical promotion, and other issues related to health care access, quality, and financing. Requirements include weekly attendance, a presentation/discussion of one health law-related current event, a research paper of at least 20 pages on any approved health law-related topic, and an oral presentation of the research paper. Evaluation will be based on the paper and class participation.

This course will examine selected topics relating to why, when and how human beings create other human beings. Feminist legal and philosophical perspectives will be featured in a close analysis of legal conflicts and the roles both sexes and the latest technologies play in contemporary reproductive practices. We look back to traditional regimes for regulating childbirth, pregnancy, contraception, and abortion; but also at current practices and ahead to novel regimes for regulating the use of genetic and other biological enhancements that permit control over how children look, behave, feel, achieve and endure. The primary texts will be Judith F. Daar, Reproductive Technologies and the Law, and a supplement of recent feminist, bioethical and other normative and policy perspectives. Students are encouraged to complete their senior writing requirement in connection with this course; but may take a final essay examination.

Admission will be limited to a maximum of 8 law students. Child abuse and neglect is a serious and chronic national problem that demands increased academic and clinical attention. Such child maltreatment gives rise to complex medical, psychological, parenting and legal issues. Unfortunately, the structures in place to respond to children who have suffered abuse or neglect are disjointed, and many of the providers of services to children at risk are inadequately trained and lack needed experience in collaborating to address the children's immediate and long-term needs. Dr. Christian, a pediatrician, and Director of the Child Abuse Referral and Evaluation (ACARE@) Clinic at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (ACHOP@), and Professor Lerner will offer an innovative, interdisciplinary, clinical seminar to bring together medical students, residents and/or fellows, and graduate social work students with upper class law students to study and compare the context, identification, and treatment of child abuse and neglect; the legal, social services and medical systems' responses to child maltreatment; and the treatment and advocacy skills necessary to help maltreated children survive and prosper. In the process, the students will jointly examine and grapple with important professional responsibility issues that arise in such interdisciplinary work. In addition to academic study of these issues, the students in the Clinic will collaborate to provide legal representation and other forms of advocacy as child advocates or Guardians Ad Litem for children who come into the jurisdiction of the Philadelphia Family Court's dependency court rooms.

This is a survey course designed to introduce students to insurance institutions and insurance law, with the ultimate goal of understanding the role of insurance in society. Liability, health, and property insurance will receive the most attention, but we will also discuss life and disability insurance. After taking this course, students will know how to read and analyze a standard form insurance contract, how to work with insurance regulatory materials, how to spot the insurance issues in a wide variety of legal and public policy contexts, and how to think about insurance related issues using conceptual tools from a variety of disciplines. Cross-cutting themes of interest include the behind the scenes role of insurance in shaping litigation strategy, the role of insurance in financial planning, and the promises and pitfalls of using private insurance arrangements to achieve social goals.

This course provides a comprehensive overview of American law as it relates to emerging ethical issues in medicine and health care. Picking up where introductory courses in health law and public health law often leave off, this course focuses on principles of constitutional, tort, administrative, and criminal law that govern the ethically-fraught landscape between the patient, the care provider, and the state. We will examine how courts and legislators have responded to various modern challenges in bioethics, including end-of-life care, maternal-fetal conflicts, genetic and reproductive technologies, exercises of conscience by health care providers, property rights in human tissue, and research ethics. There will be an in-class exam.

This course addresses the basic theoretical and scientific foundations of mental health law and then applies the foundational principles to the understanding of various criminal mental health law doctrines, including various competencies, the right to refuse treatment, the insanity defense, quasi-criminal commitment, and mitigation based on mental abnormality. The course is both theoretical and practical, and will be of use to students interested in the relation of mental health and law in any legal context.

People who are ill with bipolar disorder, major unipolar depression, schizophrenia and other DSM-IV mental illnesses have rich and difficult moral lives. Noted psychiatrists, including Sigmund Freud himself, have noted the problems of excessive and deficient moral responsibility-taking by their bipolar patients. Dr.Kay Jamison is perhaps the most famous of the contemporary autobiographers who have described struggling with issues of identity and shame that result from her acts of violence, dependency and neglect. Often educated, well-brought up, and well-employed, many people with mentally illnesses know right from wrong. Yet sometimes they do the wrong thing. They hit, lie, cheat, bribe, molest. Many of their most hurtful, damaging and illegal acts are the direct result of illnesses that unleash negative impulses and distort judgment. This seminar will examine how moralists recommend that a just and caring society judge and respond to the harmful and offensive acts of the mentally ill. The seminar will also examine how that law treats the mentally ill--refusing to excuse them for their torts and criminality, save in a narrow set of exceptional circumstances. Who should we blame? What is an excuse? What, if anything, do the ill owe the people they harm? What special moral obligations, if any, pertain to the mentally ill, their families and caretakers? Should the mentally ill be liable for intentional torts or negligence? And what about ordinary and heinous crimes?

Lawyers play a key role in making public policy, whether in legislative, executive, or judicial settings. This seminar focuses on the role of the lawyer as policy analyst, aiming to develop skills of research, analysis, and exposition suitable for effective policy counseling and decision making. The seminar will emphasize a general framework for analyzing any kind of social or economic problem and assessing different types of alternative legal solutions. Seminar participants will work either individually or in teams (at their choosing) to prepare and present their own original policy analysis of an important problem they select, geared in a format to inform an actual decision maker. There will be no final exam. Grades will be based primarily on the final policy analysis, but class participation, short papers written during the term, and an in-class presentation will be factored as well. Senior wriiting requirement may be satisfied with permission.

Privacy law is an emerging legal specialty with old, established roots in common law and the constitution. This course examines some of the cases, constitutional provisions, and state and federal statutes that together comprise the privacy law of the United States. The fundamental concern of the course will be the concept of privacy in its diverse -- and sometimes controversial -- uses by legislatures, courts, and the right-claiming public. The course will consider the actual and ideal role of law in protecting commonly ascribed rights of privacy and private choice. The course will cover privacy in relation to journalism, the internet, finance, government surveillance, health care, families, and sexuality.

This course will examine a number of urgent issues at the intersection of law and public health, particularly those that involve a conflict between the rights of individuals and the well-being of the community. Rather than being wedded to a particular field of legal doctrine, we will use a case study approach to analyze US and international conflicts over (and regulation of) tobacco, junk food, pandemics/vaccines, biobanks, traffic accidents, and HIV/AIDS, among others. Several distinguished guests will be invited to speak to the class, and students will have the opportunity to research, write, and present original research.

This course describes the concepts and techniques available to corporations, non-profit organizations, and other organizations in their efforts to manage pure risks. The costs associated with such pure risks as product liability, environmental impairments, property losses, work-related injuries, and employee benefits (e.g., pensions, health insurance, etc.) affect the daily management of all organizations. Managers who make decisions without appropriate consideration of risk management issues can jeopardize the long-term survival of their organizations. The course examines a common set of techniques which can be used by managers in dealing with these problems, including risk assumption, prevention, diversification, and transfer via insurance and non-insurance market mechanisms. In turn, students learn to recognize that the institutional structure of the organization itself influence its own risks and their corresponding treatments. This is a cross-listed Wharton business class team taught by members of the Insurance and Risk Management Department faculty.

This seminar will explore legal responses to issues of gender that arise in a variety of different contexts, including civil liberties, the family, employment, education, and athletics. Topics will include, among others, reproductive decisions, sexuality, pregnancy intervention, sexual harassment, discrimination in athletics, gay/lesbian family law, and other timely issues of sex discrimination.

Societies have cultivated tobacco and have fought over its manufacture, sale, and consumption for centuries. As tobacco's health consequences have become more clear, increasingly volatile conflicts have emerged over taxing tobacco, regulating cigarette advertising and sales, and limiting where people can smoke. This seminar will explore the legal, political, ethical, and policy issues that underlie the current conflict over smoking in the U.S., as well as in other industrialized democracies. Our focus will be on the clash between the rights of individuals who 'choose' to smoke, and the responsibility of the government to safeguard public health. We will read judicial opinions, scholarly articles, books, legislation, and popular materials.

At its best, public health law seeks to strike a reasonable balance between theories of collective good and the liberty rights of individual citizen-patients. Yet all too often, policymakers fail to recognize that the successful implementation of public health policy depends in large part on the cooperation of front-line medical professionals, whose opinions as to the appropriate balance between collective and individual goods are shaped by traditional principles of medical ethics. This course will examine circumstances in which physicians’ medical decisions may be guided not only by patient well-being, but also by the state’s public health and safety goals; case studies will include routine and reporting of infectious diseases, mental health practice, military and correctional medicine, and public health emergencies such as epidemics. Through readings in history, case law, ethics, and philosophy, this course will explore the tension between medical professionalism and societal protection, and urge students to think critically about when and how the state’s powers may be permissibly exercised to further public health objectives. For students interested in public health policy, this course provides a framework for understanding many current health policy debates.