By Adriana Lee Benedict In a couple days, petitioners in AMP v. USPTO will be filing their brief on the merits following the Supreme Court’s grant of certiorari in late November. For many, the Supreme Court’s ruling in this case will provide a long-awaited answer to the question of whether or not isolated DNA is…
By John Robertson Legal questions about end-of-life decisions have moved on since the paradigm-setting battles in the 1980’s and 1990’s. It is now clearly established that a competent person has the right to refuse needed medical treatment and to make binding advance directives about treatment if she becomes incompetent. Physician-assisted suicide is a policy choice for…
By Scott Burris Law has been an extremely effective mode of public health intervention in the last thirty years, which means that proponents of its use have won more than a few tough political battles. Nonetheless, it is hard to escape the fact that, in recent years, the public health side has been getting killed…
Founding Director of the Petrie-Flom Center, Professor Einer Elhauge, has just published an article with co-author Alex Krueger on an issue that the Supreme Court just granted certiorari on in FTC v. Watson: the proper antitrust analysis of reverse payment patent settlements. In such settlements, the alleged infringer receives a payment and agrees to stay…
By Casey Thomson This week’s Twitter Round-Up features an “American Idol-style” selection of research grant winners, the problems facing children in Syria attempting to be vaccinated, and a review of where we stand with current patient health information privacy and security. Michelle Meyer (@MichelleNMeyer) retweeted an article about a newly emerging landmark case in…
By Dan Vorhaus (Cross-Posted from Genomics Law Report) Earlier this month, my colleagues John Conley, Robert Cook-Deegan, James Evans and I published a policy article in the European Journal of Human Genetics (EJHG) entitled “The next controversy in genetic testing: clinical data as trade secrets.” The EJHG article is open access so you can read the entire article…
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 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 Christopher Robertson Paul Gowder (Iowa Law) has shared a draft of his new article, Death and Taxes in NFIB v Sebelius. Gowder thoughtfully develops some of the themes that I gestured towards in my “Lopsided Giant” post last week, trying to figure out how the Roberts opinion could uphold the constitutionality of the individual mandate as…
By Christopher Robertson Professor Elhauge‘s provocative little book, Obamacare on Trial, has many of us rethinking and revisiting the NFIB v. Sebelius decision, and I had a chance to attend the nice book talk featuring Professor Elhauge and several interlocutors last week. Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion in the case is not prominently textualist (since contemporaneous dictionary…
