Friday, January 30, 2015
Steinman Legal News Report January 30, 2015
Steinman Legal News Report January 30, 2015
http://paper.li/JanetSteinman/1368661556?edition_id=2abaed80-a86e-11e4-9b86-002590a5ba2d&utm_campaign=paper_sub&utm_medium=email&utm_source=subscription
Thursday, January 22, 2015
January 22, 1973. The Supreme Court of the United States delivers its decisions in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, legalizing elective abortion in all fifty states through the end of the first trimester of pregnancy. The case was decided on due process and privacy grounds, and the rights of physicians to determine health issues in individual situations.
January 22, 1973. The Supreme Court of the United States delivers its decisions in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, legalizing elective abortion in all fifty states through the end of the first trimester of pregnancy. The case was decided on due process and privacy grounds, and the rights of physicians to determine health issues in individual situations.
Roe v. Wade reached the Supreme Court on appeal in 1970. The Justices delayed taking action on Roe and a closely related case, Doe v. Bolton, until they decided Younger v. Harris, as they felt that the appeals raised difficult questions on judicial jurisdiction, and United States v. Vuitch, where they considered the constitutionality of a District of Columbia statute that criminalized abortion except where the mother's life or health was endangered. In Vuitch, the Court narrowly upheld the statute, though in doing so, it treated abortion as a medical procedure and stated that the physician must be given room to determine what suffices as a danger to (physical or mental) health. The day after they announced their decision in Vuitch, they voted to hear both Roe and Doe.
In his opening argument in defence of the abortion restrictions, Jay Floyd made a joke that was later described as the "Worst Joke in Legal History". Appearing against two female lawyers, Floyd began, "Mr. Chief Justice and may it please the Court. It’s an old joke, but when a man argues against two beautiful ladies like this, they are going to have the last word." His remark was met with cold silence; one observer thought that Chief Justice Burger "was going to come right off the bench at him. He glared him down".
Following a first round of arguments, all seven Justices tentatively agreed that the law should be struck down, but for varying reasons. Burger assigned the role of writing the Court's opinion in Roe (as well as Doe) to Blackmun, who began drafting a preliminary opinion that emphasized what he saw as the Texas law's vagueness. Justices Rehnquist and Powell joined the Supreme Court too late to hear the first round of arguments. Additionally, Blackmun felt that his opinion was an inadequate reflection of his liberal colleagues' opinions. In May 1972, Blackmun proposed that the case be reargued. Justice Douglas threatened to write a dissent from the reargument order (he and the other liberal Justices were suspicious that Rehnquist and Powell would vote to uphold the statute), but was coaxed out of the action by his colleagues, and his dissent was merely mentioned in the reargument order without further statement or opinion. The case was reargued on October 11, 1972. Weddington continued to represent Roe, and Texas Assistant Attorney General Robert C. Flowers stepped in to replace Jay Floyd for Texas.
Blackmun continued work on his opinions in both cases over the summer recess, despite the fact that there was no guarantee that he would be assigned to write the opinions again. Over the recess, Blackmun spent a week researching the history of abortion at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, where he had worked in the 1950s. After the Court heard the second round of arguments, Powell stated that he would agree with Blackmun's conclusion but pushed for Roe to be the lead of the two abortion cases being considered. Powell also suggested that the Court strike down the Texas law on privacy grounds. White was unwilling to sign on to Blackmun's opinion, and Rehnquist had already decided to dissent.
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=410&invol=113
Tuesday, January 20, 2015
Monday, January 19, 2015
Saturday, January 17, 2015
Je suis Nigeria.
http://zeenews.india.com/news/world/tens-of-thousands-rally-in-chad-to-support-army-move-against-boko-haram_1531915.html
Wednesday, January 14, 2015
Tuesday, January 13, 2015
Wednesday, January 7, 2015
Tuesday, January 6, 2015
Stop Subsidizing Big Pharma
Stop Subsidizing Big Pharma
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/06/opinion/stop-subsidizing-big-pharma.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region®ion=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region
From the NY Times
By LLEWELLYN HINKES-JONES
JAN. 5, 2015
WASHINGTON — ROBERT J. BEALL, the president and chief executive of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, called his recent decision to sell the royalty rights to his organization’s research a “game changer.” Indeed: Deals like this, in which an investment company paid the foundation $3.3 billion for its future royalties from several cystic fibrosis drugs it helped finance, could revolutionize the way medical research is funded. Rather than the staid model of government-funded institutions handing out grants to academic research facilities, a new breed of “venture philanthropies” like the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation could corral private investment into developing lifesaving drugs quickly and cheaply.
The problem is that venture philanthropy is, essentially, another term for privatizing scientific research. Instead of decisions about the fate of scientific funding being made by publicly oriented institutions, those decisions are being put in the hands of anonymous philanthropists and ostensibly benevolent nonprofits.
At the risk of oversimplification, biomedical research divides into two categories: private and public. The former is the constellation of big pharmaceutical companies and start-up labs. The latter comprises government agencies and the universities and philanthropies that rely on government support — directly, through grants, or indirectly, through tax policy. The former can charge whatever it wants for its products; the latter is limited by government rules and price controls.
Venture philanthropy complicates this picture by introducing a tax-exempt loophole. An organization like the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation will take in tax-exempt donations to invest in a pharmaceutical company — in this case, Vertex Pharmaceuticals — to develop drugs based on publicly funded research. Venture philanthropies can then sell the results of that research to private industry to deliver drugs to the market.
There is nothing to stop pharmaceutical companies from creating their own philanthropies, funding research with tax-exempt dollars and then selling themselves the rights to the intellectual property. Without price controls on the final product that come with public funding, the potential costs of the resulting medicines are limitless.
So far, there is no effort to extend government price controls to venture-philanthropy-derived research. The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation did little to lobby for lower prices on the drugs that were developed from the research it funded. As a result, Kalydeco, a cystic fibrosis medication it funded, is one of the most expensive drugs available, at $300,000 a year.
The idea of a public-private research transfer is not without precedent. In 1980, Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act, which allowed publicly funded universities to sell off exclusive licenses on their research to private industry. The act was intended to drive funding for academic research and innovation.
But the resulting race for private funding has created perverse incentives to research blockbuster drugs, even if they are not the most imperative from a public policy standpoint. The impetus to produce more and more profitable research has also driven down the quality of academic work, promoting ghostwritten papers, sloppy peer review and the burying of unfavorable clinical-trial results. Venture philanthropy builds off the model created by Bayh-Dole, but with tax exemptions and a sheen of generosity on top of the lucrative payoff.
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