Firearm Policy in the Hospital Setting-Recognizing Health Care as a "Sensitive Place".

Importance: Hospitals are hot zones of the US gun injury epidemic. To shelter these facilities from the dangers of gun violence, state legislatures have enacted laws to reduce the carrying of firearms on hospital premises. However, these efforts currently face serious Second Amendment challenges in federal courts.

Improving Clinician's Knowledge and Comfort with Prenatal and Postpartum Employment Laws: A Pilot Intervention.

Background: It is common for pregnant people in the United States to continue to work throughout their pregnancy. Pregnant people may need leave time or other accommodations to continue working safely. It is imperative that obstetric providers are knowledgeable regarding laws that govern the prenatal and postpartum period to provide appropriate counseling and medical documentation in support of requests for leave time and workplace accommodations.

Recognize fish as food in policy discourse and development funding.

The international development community is off-track from meeting targets for alleviating global malnutrition. Meanwhile, there is growing consensus across scientific disciplines that fish plays a crucial role in food and nutrition security. However, this 'fish as food' perspective has yet to translate into policy and development funding priorities.

True Threats, Self-Defense, and the Second Amendment.

Does the Second Amendment protect those who threaten others by negligently or recklessly wielding firearms? What line separates constitutionally legitimate gun displays from threatening activities that can be legally proscribed? This article finds guidance in the First Amendment doctrine of true threats, which permits punishment of "statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individual." The Second Amendment, like the First, should not be read to protect those who threaten unlawful violence. And to the degree that the constitution requires a culpable mental state (mens rea) in such circumstances, the appropriate standard should be recklessness.

Why Regulate Guns?

Courts reviewing gun laws that burden Second Amendment rights ask how effectively the laws serve public safety - yet typically discuss public safety narrowly, without considering the many dimensions of that interest gun laws serve. "Public safety" is a social good: it includes the public's interest in physical safety as a good in itself, and as a foundation for community and for the exercise of constitutional liberties. Gun laws protect bodies from bullets - and Americans' freedom and confidence to participate in every domain of our shared life, whether to attend school, to shop, to listen to a concert, to gather for prayer, or to assemble in peaceable debate.

The problem with relying on profit-driven models to produce pandemic drugs.

In this article, we explain why profit-driven models for developing treatments for epidemic pathogens produce sub-optimal and sometimes negative public health outcomes. Using the example of the drug remdesivir, we demonstrate how the divergence of private incentives from public health needs has led to such outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic. We conclude that policy responses to this and future pandemics ought to be conceived and designed in ways that narrow the divergence of private interests from public health needs, including through greater public-sector involvement in pharmaceutical R&D.

Association between divorce and risks for acute myocardial infarction.

Background: Divorce is a major life stressor that can have economic, emotional, and physical health consequences. However, the cumulative association between divorce and risks for acute myocardial infarction (AMI) is unknown. This study investigated the association between lifetime exposure to divorce and the incidence of AMI in US adults.

IMPROVING (SOFTWARE) PATENT QUALITY THROUGH THE ADMINISTRATIVE PROCESS.

The available evidence indicates that patent quality, particularly in the area of software, needs improvement. This Article argues that even an agency as institutionally constrained as the U.S.

The social value of mortality risk reduction: VSL versus the social welfare function approach.

We examine how different welfarist frameworks evaluate the social value of mortality risk reduction. These frameworks include classical, distributively unweighted cost-benefit analysis--i.e.

Certificates of Confidentiality: Protecting Human Subject Research Data in Law and Practice.

Researchers often require and collect sensitive information about individuals to answer important scientific questions that impact individual health and well-being and the public health. Researchers recognize they have a duty to maintain the confidentiality of the data they collect and typically make promises, which are documented in the consent form. The legal interests of others, however, can threaten researchers' promises of confidentiality, if they seek access to the data through subpoena.

The liberty of free riders: the minimum coverage provision, Mill's "harm principle," and American social morality.

A direct requirement for most Americans to purchase any product or service ...

Synthetic biology: caught between property rights, the public domain, and the commons.

Synthetic biology presents a particularly revealing example of the difficulty of assimilating a new technology into the conceptual limits around existing intellectual property rights.

Expert evidence, the adversary system, and the jury.

Many assertions have been made about the competence of juries in dealing with expert evidence. I review the types of expert evidence that jurors hear and the impact of adversary legal procedure on the form and manner in which evidence is presented. Empirical research indicates that jurors understand the adversary process, that they do not automatically defer to the opinions of experts, and that their verdicts appear to be generally consistent with external criteria of performance.

Generic prejudice and the presumption of guilt in sex abuse trials.

In 25 Canadian criminal trials involving charges of sexual abuse, 849 prospective jurors were asked under oath whether they could hear the evidence, follow the judge's instructions on the law, and decide the case with a fair and impartial mind. Knowing only the nature of the charges against the accused, on average 36% of the jurors stated that they could not be impartial. Some jurors explained that they themselves had been victims of abuse, others expressed fears for children, while others stated simply that they could not set aside a presumption of guilt.