By Michele Goodwin In mid-April, Boko Haram, an extremist organization operating in the northern region of Nigeria, kidnapped nearly 300 girls from their boarding school in Borno. Kidnappers threatened that the girls would be sold to sex trafficking rings in neighboring countries, causing international alarm. In the weeks since that mass kidnapping, world leaders…
By Dov Fox You know the King of Pop died in 2009 while rehearsing for a comeback tour in London. Here’s a twist you may not have heard about: Michael Jackson fan club members sued Conrad Murray, the doctor who administered the lethal overdose of anesthesia. And the celebrity enthusiasts won. A French court recently awarded five of the grieving fans economic damages (albeit…
By Michael Young Recent Center for Medicare & Medicaid regulations incentivizing reductions in 30-day hospital readmission rates have prompted a flurry of research into how clinicians and administrators can optimize patient health following hospital discharge. Preventable hospital readmissions in the U.S. are estimated to account for up to $15 billion in annual healthcare spending. In considering this problem, many analysts and innovators…
By Deborah Cho I was recently pointed to this poignant post on mental health within the legal profession. The post is the first of a three-part series that is titled “We Need To Start Talking About Why So Many Lawyers Are Killing Themselves.” Parts 2 and 3 can be found here and here, respectively. Please refer…
By Alex Stein A clinical social worker hears from his patient about the patient’s interest in child pornography, but does nothing to solve the problem. Later on, the police raids the patient’s house to find evidence that he illegally downloaded, viewed and possessed child pornography. The patient now faces criminal charges. Can he sue the social…
The MGH Center for Law, Brain and Behavior and Harvard Law School’s Petrie-Flom Center announce joint “Project on Law and Applied Neuroscience” for 2014-2016 The MGH Center for Law, Brain and Behavior and the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School will collaborate on a joint venture – the…
By Nathaniel Counts In our legal system, colleges may not make admissions decisions in order to ameliorate historical (or presumably other) inequalities, but may make decisions that take into account the particular situation of the applicant or that strive to create a diverse student body. Justice Powell rejected the former two goals in Part IV…
By Matthew L Baum This past Sunday, a group of researchers reported in the journal, Nature Medicine, a preliminary technique that uses variation in blood levels of 10 fats to predict the likelihood that elderly individuals would develop mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or Alzheimer’s Disease in the following 2-3 years. The sample size was small…
By Nathaniel Counts We live in a time when increasingly our personal information is publicly available on the internet. This personal information includes our names and phone numbers, things we’ve written and things we’ve done, along with a good deal of information that only exists because we interact with others on the internet – thoughts…
Evaluating the Revised Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) Tuesday, March 11, 2014, 12:00pm Wasserstein Hall 3018, Harvard Law School, 1585 Massachusetts Ave. The DSM is the reference used by clinicians, researchers, and insurers to diagnose and classify mental disorders, with the intent to provide specific, objective criteria by which to assess symptoms and…
