Bioethics

Disability Law and the Case for Evidence-Based Triage in a Pandemic

When lifesaving medical treatments are scarce, disability law permits triage policies to consider patients’ probability of survival and post-treatment life expectancy. Evidence-based triage that considers these factors, rather than inaccurate stereotypes, can be not only legal and ethical, but consonant with the goals of disability law and advocacy.

Who Gets the Ventilator? Disability Discrimination in COVID-19 Medical-Rationing Protocols

The coronavirus pandemic has forced us to take the threat of rationing life-saving treatments seriously. Many health systems employ protocols that explicitly deprioritize people for these treatments based on pre-existing disabilities. This argues that such protocols violate the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Rehabilitation Act, and the Affordable Care Act.

The “M” in MLP: A Proposal for Expanding the Roles of Clinicians in Medical-Legal Partnerships

Oral Tradition and the Kennewick Man

In April 2016, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers confirmedthat the ancient human body discovered in 1996 near Kennewick, Washington,often referred to as the “Kennewick Man” or “The Ancient One,” is geneticallyrelated to modern-day Native Americans. Thisconfirmation ended a twenty-year-long struggle between scientists at the Smithsonian, the U.S. Department of the Interior, and Native American tribes ofthe Columbia Plateau, and will now jumpstart the process for repatriation ofthe Kennewick Man to the Native American tribes for reburial in accordance withthe Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (NAGPRA).

Patents, Paradigm Shifts, and Progress in Biomedical Science

114 Yale L.J. 661 (2004) This Note applies the concept of paradigm shifts from the history and philosophy of science to describe how patents on biomedical research tools--inputs to basic research--can help advance scientific theory. Patents on research tools frustrate scientific norms of sharing and can produce a tragedy of the anticommons that inhibits downstream experimentation. This provides an incentive for scientists to fundamentally reconceptualize natural phenomena in ways that do not depend on patented inputs for their exploration, thereby encouraging the alternative theory generation that drives profound scientific progress. The Note argues for a new patent system for biomedical research tools that better promotes both normal scientific processes of theory validation and the generation of alternative hypotheses that spark paradigm shifts.