By Leslie Francis A case from the employment discrimination world that might be of interest to health law folks is EEOC v. Houston Funding II, Ltd., 2013 U.S. App. LEXIS 10933 (May 30, 2013). The employee in the case, Donnicia Venters, was told that her position had been filled when she returned to work post…
By Holly Fernandez Lynch Given my recent piece in the New England Journal on discrimination against patients, particularly obese patients in the context of the Americans with Disabilities Act, I found this NY Times story particularly interesting: Disability and Discrimination at the Doctor’s Office. The Times story focuses on patients who are disabled in more traditional…
By I. Glenn Cohen [Cross-Posted at PrawfsBlawg] One of my favorite initiatives at Harvard Law School, where I teach, is that faculty members get to offer an optional 10-12 student not-for-credit “First-Year Reading Groups” on a topic of interest to them that is related to law in some way but not too law-class like. I’ve…
By Michelle Meyer A few weeks ago, I blogged about a recent episode of This American Life, “Dr. Gilmer and Mr. Hyde,” about the quest of one Dr. Gilmer (Benjamin) to understand why another, beloved Dr. Gilmer (Vince), had brutally murdered his own father after hearing voices that compelled him to do so. The episode…
By Holly Fernandez Lynch Following up on a blog post I did here several months ago, take a look at – and a listen to – some additional commentary I have in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine. The gist? The law prohibits many, but not all, grounds for discrimination against potential patients. Race, religion, sex, and…
By Michelle Meyer Update: This American Life has made a clarification. Please see this post for more. Let me begin by saying how much I absolutely adore This American Life. I listen to it religiously. I particularly had been looking forward to the most recent pocast episode of TAL: Dr. Gilmer and Mr. Hyde. As the…
By Kimberly Mutcherson On Friday, April 5, a group of almost 30 (mostly legal) scholars gathered at Rutgers Law-Camden to have difficult conversations about abortion and assisted reproduction. The event, sponsored by Rutgers Law and the Law School Initiative of the Center for Reproductive Rights (https://reproductiverights.org/en/our-work/law-school-initiative) sought to initiate discussion about the seeming gulf between…
By Allison M. Whelan So much of the political and legal debate about reproductive choice centers on abortion. In doing so, these debates obscure so many other reproductive choices women must make. And the choices are not easy—and the stakes are even greater in an era where any prenatal missteps might lead to aggressive state…
Dov Fox has an interesting new piece up at HuffPo examining the constitutionality of the abortion restrictions just enacted in North Dakota: As the Supreme Court heard oral arguments this week in the same-sex marriage cases, North Dakota enacted three of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country. Two of them are unlike any ever considered…
A front-page story in today’s Sunday Boston Globe quotes Bill of Health blogger Dov Fox on whether the routine use of new prenatal blood testing could “‘bring a tendency to exclude rather than accommodate people whose abilities fail to meet [certain] demands’” of modern society or “‘exert[] social pressure on parents to terminate pregnancy for fear of criticism or reproach from…
