By Christopher Robertson Invoking the First Amendment protection of speech, the Second Circuit today reversed a criminal conviction for a drug salesman’s promotion of a drug beyond its FDA-approved uses. The case in U.S. v. Caronia; the opinion is here, and here’s the Reuters story. In First Amendment cases like Western States Medical Center and Sorrell v. IMS,…
By Christopher Robertson The Washington Post covers a new order by DC district court judge Gladys Kessler, arising out of an old RICO case brought by the federal government, requiring that the tobacco companies publish advertisements to confess publicly that they previously lied about the safety of smoking and manipulated cigarettes to make them more…
By Christopher Robertson The Washington Post has an extensive story about the drug and device industry’s influence on the outcomes of clinical trials, which are published in leading medical journals and which then shape the prescribing decisions of physicians everywhere. Below the fold, I share some of my own thinking on this issue, and link…
By Holly Fernandez Lynch Following up on Chris Robertson’s and Kevin Outterson’s posts below (here and here), I just wanted to draw your attention to another federal district court opinion on the contraceptives coverage mandate. This one is from Nov. 19 and involves the owners of Hobby Lobby. The court denied their motion for a…
By Kevin Outterson I wrote last week (at TIE) that corporations might have First Amendment or RFRA religious rights to object to contraception coverage. Now we have a second federal judge agreeing, this time on behalf of Tyndale Bible Publishers (complaint here; preliminary injunction here). The short answer: The plaintiffs have therefore shown that the…
By Christopher Robertson Yesterday (Friday Nov 16), U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton granted a preliminary injunction barring enforcement of the contraceptive coverage mandate that was part of the regulations implementing the Affordable Care Act (ACA). There is lots of news coverage (e.g., HuffPo and WaPo), but as usual, the news organizations do not link to the…
By Holly Fernandez Lynch Well, hopefully we’ll know the fate of the ACA by tonight. But even if President Obama wins, there will still be uncertainty about the fate of the contraceptives coverage mandate. A number of employers claim that the mandate violates their rights to religious freedom by requiring them to offer free coverage…
By Erin Talati As Holly Lynch describes in her recent post, the upcoming election brings a number of bioethics questions directly to the public. Two of the three ballot questions in Massachusetts invite discussion and debate on the controversial issues of physician-assisted suicide and the medical use of marijuana. The introduction of these issues as…
By Nadia N. Sawicki Litigation challenging the PPACA contraception mandate continues, and last week’s decision by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri in O’Brien v. HHS brings the total number of decisions on the merits to two (three cases – Nebraska v. Sebelius, Wheaton College v. Sebelius, and Belmont Abbey v.…
By Holly Fernandez Lynch Related to the conversations we’ve been having lately on conscience, I wanted to point you to a relatively new book on the topic by Mark Wicclair: Conscientious Objection in Health Care: An Ethical Analysis, Cambridge University Press, 2011. From Amazon: “Historically associated with military service, conscientious objection has become a significant phenomenon…
