News from the Center for Health Policy and Law
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Greetings from the Center Directors
This year promises to be one of our busiest yet! In addition to our Annual Health Law Lecture (fall 2019) and Annual Health Law Conference (spring 2020), we are thrilled to host the 43rd Annual Health Law Professors Conference (summer 2020) alongside the American Society for Law, Medicine & Ethics (ASLME).
The Center continues to expand as we welcome new faculty members and a visiting faculty scholar. Our
Public Health Law Watch
(PHLW) initiative is receiving a lot of attention these days due to an amicus brief submitted in the national prescription opiate litigation; PHLW also continues to work with our colleagues around the country to draft briefs and file regulatory comments related to critical public health law issues. In addition, we welcomed our largest cohort of Health Law Scholars to date!
Enjoy reading, and we hope to see you at some or all of our events!
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Wendy E. Parmet
Faculty Director
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Jennifer Lea Huer
Managing Director
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About the Center for Health Policy and Law
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Based in Northeastern University School of Law, the Center for Health Policy and Law draws from participating departments across Northeastern University to provide a rich context for students and researchers interested in public health law, health and human rights, health governance, intellectual property, bioethics, health care delivery law and the regulation of our health care system. It is guided by faculty and staff with diverse areas of expertise and is affiliated with an array of university-wide institutes, programs and experiential learning opportunities.
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Conferences and Major Events
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ANNUAL LECTURE IN HEALTH POLICY AND LAW
We Will Be Citizens: From AIDS Activism to Mobilizing for (Health) Justice …
Friday, October 25, 2019 | 12:00 - 1:30 PM
Northeastern University School of Law
Join us for our 2019 Lecture in Health Policy and Law, featuring
Gregg Gonsalves
,
assistant professor of epidemiology (microbial diseases) at Yale School of Public Health and associate (adjunct) professor of law and co-director of the Global Health Justice Partnership and the Collaboration for Research Integrity and Transparency at Yale Law School.
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Hearing on Domestic Violence, Sexual Assault and Child Abuse in the City of Boston
Monday, October 28, 2019 | 12:00 - 1:30 PM
Northeastern University School of Law
The Center for Health Policy and Law is proud to collaborate with Northeastern Law
’s
Domestic Violence Institute to host a hearing on domestic violence and sexual assault in the city of Boston, in partnership with Boston City Council President Andrea Campbell and Councilor Ed Flynn. The hearing, which will be held during the final week of National Domestic Violence Awareness Month, will discuss opportunities to reduce incidences of domestic violence, sexual assault and child abuse in the Boston and ways to make it easier to report these incidents and support survivors.
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ANNUAL HEALTH LAW CONFERENCE
Public Health Litigation: Possibilities and Pitfalls
Friday, April 17, 2020 | 12:00 - 1:30 PM
Northeastern University School of Law
This conference will bring together leading academics, activists and policymakers to drill down into the possibilities and pitfalls of litigating in the public health context. The conference will also celebrate
Professor Richard Daynard’s 50-year career in legal education and pioneering work in the field of public health. Daynard, president of Northeastern Law’s Public Health Advocacy Institute, is renowned for his role as one of the main architects of establishing the legal responsibility of the tobacco industry for tobacco-induced death, disease and disability.
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CALL FOR PAPERS
In conjunction with our 2020 conference, the Center for Health Policy and Law seeks abstracts for papers discussing one or more of the myriad issues raised by affirmative public health litigation. Papers may look at a multitude of related issues, including the efficacy of such litigation (in one or more domains), the barriers such litigation face, critiques of such litigation and/or possible reforms. Authors of the selected abstracts will be invited to present at the conference on Friday, April 17, 2020, and publish their papers in the
Northeastern University Law Review
. Please email
lawhealth@northeastern.edu
with “2020 Call for Papers
”
in the subject line.
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Health Law Professors Conference
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Over the course of three days, colleagues from across the United States will gather in Boston to share ideas, research and policy/legal updates on myriad issues, including Medicaid and Medicare, public health, the opioid crisis, reproductive health, bioethics and more.
Interested in presenting at the conference? We are accepting proposals for individual presentations or panels. Proposals are due by January 15, 2020.
Conference details, including registration information, will be posted on our
website
as planning develops.
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Video: Come to Boston — A City Where Health Law History is Made!
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Northeastern Law Receives A
+
in Health Law from
preLaw
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In its recent Back to School 2019 issue,
preLaw magazine gave Northeastern Law an A
+ in Health Law. See the
full list.
Northeastern Law also earned an A
+ in Human Rights Law and was highlighted on
preLaw
’
s list of professional development leaders.
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Northeastern University School of Law Welcomes New Faculty
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Jonathan Kahn
, a leading authority on biotechnology’s implications for our ideas of identity, rights and citizenship, with a particular focus on race and justice, has joined Northeastern University as Professor of Law and Biology.
Kahn, previously a member of the Mitchell Hamline School of Law faculty, holds a joint appointment with the School of Law and the Department of Biology in the College of Science. Kahn is a faculty fellow with the Center for Health Policy and Law.
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Patricia Williams
, one of the most provocative intellectuals in American law and a pioneer of both the law and literature and critical race theory movements in American legal theory, has joined Northeastern University from Columbia Law School. As University Distinguished Professor of Law and Humanities at Northeastern, she holds a joint appointment between the School of Law and the Department of Philosophy and Religion in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities. She is also
collaborating with the Center for Health Policy and Law.
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Michael Sinha Joins Center for Health Policy and Law as Visiting Scholar
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Dr. Michael Sinha has joined the Center for Health Policy and Law as a visiting scholar. In addition to his research activities, he is teaching an upper-level course, Drug Law and Policy.
Sinha is also a regulatory science fellow in the new Harvard-MIT Center for Regulatory Science within the Harvard Program in Therapeutic Science (HiTS) at Harvard Medical School and is affiliated with the Program On Regulation, Therapeutics, And Law (PORTAL), within the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics in the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
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Public Health Law Watch Et Al. File Amicus Brief in Opiate MDL
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During the case’s first hearing in January 2018, Judge Dan Aaron Polster
told
lawyers that he expected to see a settlement that would reduce the adverse public health impact of the opioid crisis, instead of just “moving money around.” The amicus brief submitted by PHLW et al. proposes just that: a settlement that includes a framework for addressing the opioid crisis and has a meaningful positive impact on public health.
Public Health Law Watch is an initiative of the Center for Health Policy and Law and the George Consortium.
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Judge Cites Amicus Brief in Public Charge Decision
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The Center, in collaboration with Public Health Law Watch (PHLW),
Health in Justice Action Lab and others, was a signatory to an
amicus brief drafted by Professor Wendy Parmet,
Health Law Advocates (HLA) and
Foley Hoag in response to the recent Public Charge Rule. The brief, filed in the state of Washington, was cited in the federal
court’s decision to block the Trump administration’s implementation of the new rule. This was one of several lawsuits filed across the US and one of multiple jurisdictions in which the brief was submitted. Courts in California and New York filed similar decisions.
The order by the Washington federal court referenced the brief:
“As further illustration of DHS’s unmooring from its Congressionally delegated authority, DHS justifies including receipt of Medicaid in the public charge consideration by reciting that “the total Federal expenditure for the Medicaid program overall is by far larger than any other program for low-income people.” ECF No. 109 at 41 (brief from
Health Law Advocates
and other public health organizations, quoting 84 Fed. Reg. at 41,379). However, “[t]he cost of Medicaid is not DHS’s concern[, as] Congress delegated the implementation and administration of Medicaid, including the cost of the program, to HHS and the states.” Id. (citing 42 U.S.C. §§ 1396, 1396-1, 1315(a)). Congress cannot delegate authority that the Constitution does not allocate to the federal government in the first place, and the states exercise a central role in formulation and administration of health care policy.”
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Leo Beletsky has been awarded academic tenure and promoted to the rank of professor of law and health sciences. A prolific interdisciplinary scholar and leading authority on the opioid crisis, Beletsky is founding director of the
Health in Justice Action Lab and a faculty member of the Center for Health Policy and Law.
Beletsky is part of two projects that recently received funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA):
Quantifying Health Policy Impacts on Substance Use and Treatment Among Women with and at Risk for HIV and
Developing the Evidence Base for Overdose Policies: A Multilevel Analysis of the National HIV Behavioral Surveillance Data. The projects bring together members of Northeastern University’s Bouvé College of Health Sciences and the
Institute for Health Equity and Social Justice Research.
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Claudia Haupt, associate professor of law and political science, has been appointed to the board of editors of the
German Law Journal, one of the world’s leading academic forums concerned with transnational law.
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Parmet also recently joined the advisory board of the American Bar Association’s Public Health Legal Services Research Project.
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Lindauer is also part of a project team that received a Northeastern University Tier 1 grant. The project,
Pathways to Healing: A Mixed Methods Investigation of the Role of Justice in Healing of Mental, Physical, and Social Wounds of Sexual Assault Survivors, brings together investigators and experts from Northeastern University’s Bouvé College of Health Science, School of Law, College of Social Sciences and Humanities and Merrimack College.
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Selected Faculty and Staff Publications
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Selected highlights from core and affiliated faculty members. Please visit our website for a full listing.
Aziza Ahmed
- “Forensic Science in Self-Induced Abortion Prosecutions,” Boston University Law Review (forthcoming).
- “Transnational Legal Orders and Global Health,” in Oxford Handbook of Transnational Law (forthcoming 2019).
- “Health and Human Rights: Harm-Reduction and the Fight to Decriminalize Public Health Services,” American Society of International Law Proceedings (forthcoming 2019).
- “Sex, Markets, and Political Economy,” Law and Political Economy (Sept. 18, 2019) (co-author).
Brook Baker
- “Intellectual Property Law and the Right to Health: A History of TRIPs and Access to Medicine,” in Three Generations of Access to Medications, eds. S. Ragavan et al. (Routledge, forthcoming 2020).
- “House Democrats Must Include Generic Licensing Provisions in H.R.3 In Order to Deliver a Meaningful Check on Big Pharma’s Greed,” Health GAP Blog (Oct. 16, 2019).
- “The ‘Lower Drug Costs Now Act of 2019’: What’s Good, What’s Bad, and What Must Be Improved,” Health GAP Blog (Sept. 20, 2019).
- “Letter to the Senate Subcommittee on Intellectual Property on Pharmaceutical Competition and Patents,” R Street (June 11, 2019) (co-author).
Leo Beletsky
- “Learning the Lessons of Tobacco: A Public Health Approach to the Opioid Settlements,” Health Affairs Blog (Sept. 26, 2019) (co-author).
- “Practicing What We Preach — Ending Physician Health Program Bans on Opioid-Agonist Therapy,” 381 The New England Journal of Medicine 796 (2019) (co-author).
- “State Approaches to Addressing the Overdose Epidemic: Public Health Focus Needed,” 47 The Journal of Law, Medicine, & Ethics 43 (2019) (co-author).
- “Interactive Versus Video-Based Training of Police to Communicate Syringe Legality to People Who Inject Drugs: The SHIELD Study, Mexico, 2015–2016,” 109 American Journal of Public Health 921 (2019)(co-author).
- “The Opioid Crisis: A Failure of Regulatory Design and Action,” 34 Criminal Justice 35 (Summer 2019) (co-author).
- “America’s Favorite Antidote: Drug-induced Homicide in the Age of the Overdose Crisis,” 2019 Utah Law Review 833 (2019).
- “Drug-induced Homicide: Challenges and Strategies in Criminal Defense,” 70 South Carolina Law Review 707 (2019) (co-author).
Martha Davis
Claudia Haupt
Jonathan Kahn
Faith Khalik
Kristin Madison
Wendy E. Parmet
- “Learning the Lessons of Tobacco: A Public Health Approach to the Opioid Settlements,” Health Affairs Blog (Sept. 26, 2019) (co-author).
- “What Deporting Sick Immigrants Says About America,” Cognoscenti (Sept. 4, 2019).
- “The Trump Administration’s New Public Charge Rule: Implications for Health Care & Public Health,” Health Affairs Blog (Aug. 13, 2019).
- “The Worst of Health: Law and Policy at the Intersection of Health and Immigration,” 16 Indiana Health Law Review 211 (2019).
- “The Role of Advocacy in Public Health Law,” 47 The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 15 (2019) (co-author).
- “Public Health Law and Policy Implications: Justice Kavanaugh,” 47 The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 59 (2019) (co-author).
- “Public Health and Health Care: Integration, Disintegration, or Eclipse,” 46 Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 940 (2019) (co-author).
- “The Problems of Living in a Post-Truth World,” The Hartford Courant (June 9, 2019) (co-author).
Michael Sinha
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Selected Fall/Winter Faculty and Staff Presentations
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Brook Baker
Panel: Non-voluntary Licensing of Pharmaceutical Patents: Assessing the Post-Doha Declaration TRIPs System
September 2019
Plenary Panel: Access Strategies, Patent Pool Mechanisms and Licensing for Medical Products and Health Technologies Including the Role of the Pharmaceutical Sector
November 2019
“Amazing Progress and Imminent Dangers: Scaling Up Access to Treatment in the AIDS Response”
December 2019
Revitalizing Global Health Agencies
’
Work on Intellectual Property
| Paris, France
December 2019
Leo Beletsky
“The Continuing Struggle to Harmonize Drug Law with Public Health Evidence and Practice”
September 2019
“Stigma in Enforcement and Punishment”
October 2019
Claudia Haupt
“Artificial Professional Advice”
November 2019
Jennifer Lea Huer
Becoming a Global Citizen: Analyzing Immigrant & Refugee Health, Boston University | Boston, Massachusetts
Keynote Address
October 2019
Wendy E. Parmet
“Using Law to Address the Social Determinants of Health”
September 2019
“Health Implications of the Public Charge Rule”
November 2019
Michael Sinha
“State Efforts to Rein in Drug Pricing”
October 2019
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September 17
Senior Writer,
STAT News
October 25
Associate Professor, Saint Louis University
Fellow, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University
November 7
Edward R. Utley Professor of Health Law, Center for Health Law, Ethics & Human Rights, Boston University School of Public Health and Boston University School of Law
Professor of Medicine, Boston University School of Medicine
January 8
Senior Attorney and AIDS Law Project Director, GLAD Legal Advocates & Defenders
February 13
Associate Professor, Sociology and International Affairs, Northeastern University
Faculty Scholar, Institute for Health Equity and Social Justice Research
March 25
Jonathan Kahn
Professor of Law and Biology, Northeastern University
Faculty Fellow, Center for Health Policy and Law
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