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Consequentialist Retribution’s Real-World Ramifications and How It Impacts Judicial Credibility
Get PDFThe Future of Health Care Must Be Harm Reductionist—To Bring It About, We Need Moral Philosophy
Get PDFIn the United States, more than 100,000 people now die each year from drug overdose, but nearly all of these deaths are preventable. The purpose of this Article is to show that harm reduction interventions could go a long way towards saving these lives, but we don’t adopt many of these interventions, or fail to adopt them at the scale needed. Although it is often suggested by opponents of harm reduction that the interventions are unlikely to actually reduce harm, this Article argues that the empirical debate is largely over—decades of data demonstrate that harm reduction saves lives, promotes health, saves money, and even improves public order. Rather, this Article suggests opposition to harm reduction is actually often moral, stemming from the implicit moral philosophies that we all carry around. For this reason, this Article takes seriously some of the most powerful ethical arguments against harm reduction, and shows that the richest philosophy of harm reduction undermines these arguments by recognizing the value neutrality of drug use. This Article concludes that harm reduction is justified on a wide variety of moral philosophical grounds
At a Glance: Defining Missouri’s Homeschooling Regulations
Get PDFAmerican parents have a right to homeschool their children, and it is only growing in popularity. Each state has the power to regulate homeschooling, and some do not regulate it at all. In this article, Christine Hall analyzes the practical application of Missouri\u27s homeschooling statute and argues for a change in these regulations.https://scholarship.law.slu.edu/lawjournalonline/1109/thumbnail.jp
Legitimacy without Legality
Get PDFBeyond the controversy on women’s right to elect an abortion, in Dobbs v. Jackson there is a deep yet hidden disagreement over the Court’s source of legitimacy. The majority judgment speaks of the Court’s source of legitimacy in terms of expertise, while the dissenting opinion speaks of it in terms of public support. My starting point for exposing this disagreement is the divergence between the accurate quote of Alexander Hamilton’s famous dictum from the Federalist No. 78 in Justice Alito’s majority opinion, and dissenting Justice Breyer’s paraphrase of the same dictum in the Dobbs oral arguments. The paraphrased version replaced Hamilton’s saying that without the sword and the purse, all the Court has is “judgment” with the saying that all the Court has is “public confidence.” For many decades, both conservative and progressive justices have built an entire jurisprudence that positioned the paraphrase of this dictum as its cornerstone. This seemingly minor paraphrasing captures a profound shift in understanding the Court’s source of legitimacy from understanding it in terms of expertise to understanding it in terms of public support. This shift has led to the Court’s continuous undermining of the traditional divide between law as the domain of reason, and politics as the domain of will. The traditional divide ensured that after going through the political process of passing a law, in the realm of legality, reason (or “judgment” in Hamilton’s terms) reigned supreme. However, starting in the 1930s, the ability to measure public support of the Supreme Court in public opinion polls made legitimacy—understood in terms of public support—the metric for assessing the Court and its judgements. Subsequently, correctness in constitutional law has become more and more dependent on public acceptance rather than the issue of reasoned legal argumentation. Alito’s approach in Dobbs reverts to Hamilton’s original understanding of the Court’s source of legitimacy and has the potential to serve as the starting point for reversing the dangerous trend of eroding the divide between law and politics. To succeed in re-establishing this divide, the Court will have to reconsider other precedents beginning with Heller
Who Pays First?: Medicaid Third-Party Liability in Florida and Virginia’s Birth-Related Neurological Injury Compensation Programs
Get PDFIn response to an impending obstetrician shortage and medical malpractice crisis, the states of Florida and Virginia adopted no-fault birth-related neurological injury compensation programs in the 1980s. Both of these programs provide lifetime coverage for eligible children with serious birth-related neurological injuries; however, both programs treated themselves as the payer of last resort and required families to submit claims to Medicaid first based on an inaccurate interpretation of Medicaid third party-liability (“TPL”) laws and the program-enabling statutes. Both programs’ policies treating themselves as the payer of last resort not only violated Federal and State Medicaid laws, they caused harm to the enrolled children and their families and resulted in False Claims Act lawsuits. This Article examines the Medicaid TPL policies in Florida and Virginia’s birth-related neurological injury compensation programs and a proposed program in Maryland as well as proposes recommendations for future statutory, administrative guidance, and policy changes to avoid Medicaid TPL issues in the future. It argues that clear and consistent legislation, policies, and administrative guidance are needed to address Medicaid TPL issues in existing programs and ensure similar issues do not recur in the future
Rethinking the Value of Originalism
Get PDFOriginalism is one of many approaches to Constitutional interpretation that has evolved and changed from the time of its inception. In this article, Tobias Gibson, Jakob Gibson, and Matthew Trout discusses the disagreement between the application and interpretation of what originalism constitutes and mandates.https://scholarship.law.slu.edu/lawjournalonline/1123/thumbnail.jp
