University of California Hastings College of the Law
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The FDA’s Role in Regulating Access to Gender-Affirming Care Medications
No full textOver the last decade, many states have passed laws seeking to restrict or ban certain medications approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA). One of the most recent examples: gender-affirming care medications for transgender youth and young adults. As of January 2025, twenty-six states have passed laws banning or restricting the provision of genderaffirming care to minors. Proponents of these laws challenge the procedures and prescription drugs as “experimental,” while critics of these laws characterize both as best-practice medical care. In either case, these laws demonstrate a second-guessing of the FDA’s long-established authority in determining the safety of prescription drugs. Although the FDA does not regulate the practice of medicine, the effect of these healthcare regulations is to limit or prohibit access to FDA-approved medications. This inconsistency raises the question of what the FDA’s role is— and should be—in protecting access to medicines.
This Article considers the FDA’s role in securing access to medications, focusing on the case of gender-affirming care medications. In doing so, this Article makes three key contributions. First, this Article provides a comprehensive account of the state laws restricting access to genderaffirming care. Second, this Article analyzes how these state laws interact with federal prescription drug regulation and demonstrates the limitations of FDA authority in preempting state laws on gender-affirming care medications. Third, this Article argues that federal prescription drug regulation must be strengthened in order to protect patients’ equitable access to medicines, including, but not limited to, gender-affirming care medications. Noting the historical role of the FDA in medical care and drug regulations, as well as the federalist implications of expanding this authority, this Article frames the FDA as not only a consumer protection agency, but also as an access to medicines agency. This framework will support the development of reforms centered at the FDA aiming to secure and expand the availability of prescription drugs for patients across the country
“HIPPO” Law Law and the Biodiversity Crisis of Habitat Loss, Invasive Species, Pollution, Population, and Overharvesting
No full textThis article explores the critical issue of biodiversity loss through the lens of the “HIPPO” acronym coined by Edward O. Wilson: Habitat loss, Invasive species, Pollution, Population, and Overharvesting. It examines the ecological and social ramifications of declining biodiversity and assesses existing legal frameworks aimed at mitigating these threats. Furthermore, the article proposes innovative legal mechanisms to address each HIPPO factor, offering a legal approach that spans many different domains. By integrating comparative legal analysis and suggesting forward-looking legal reforms, this work aims to contribute to the conservation efforts essential for sustaining biodiversity in the face of escalating environmental challenges
Litigation as Accommodation
No full textAs persistent threats to the integrity of some of our most important public institutions remind us, every public institution faces the challenge of combating the abuse of its powers for ends inconsistent with the public values it aims to serve. Public law employs a distinctive set of strategies for addressing that challenge: vesting institutional powers with public officials, imposing public-regarding duties on those officials, and ensuring compliance with the duties by subjecting officials’ decisions to various forms of oversight and accountability.
This Article argues that the public institution of civil litigation pursues a very different strategy for countering abuse from public law’s, one that belies predominant scholarly understandings of civil procedure and reveals an inherent, ineliminable tension within any liberal civil justice system between the impartial public values such a system espouses and the significant degree of partiality it must permit parties to display for their own personal interests, relationships, and moral beliefs. Parties can end up exercising their partiality by engaging in litigation conduct that contravenes important public values. And yet, it turns out that civil procedure doesn’t always suppress such conduct, but often tolerates, and sometimes even facilitates, it. The result is that civil procedure frequently declines to compel parties to internalize all the moral costs of their litigation conduct, thus affording them a series of moral subsidies. Those moral subsidies, this Article contends, are best understood as a kind of accommodation, which in other contexts has been theorized as the tolerated externalization of some of the costs—including the moral costs—of individual conduct for the sake of autonomy and other personal values.
By better comprehending civil procedure’s accommodations and their normative logic, we can more readily appreciate conflicts between parties’ personal interests and moral beliefs, on the one hand, and, on the other, the public values we expect the civil justice system to reflect or promote, as well as more candidly debate the resulting value tradeoffs. And while those tradeoffs are inevitable, this Article identifies current practices in civil procedure that appear either to confer significant moral subsidies even in the absence of substantial personal interests or to fail to adequately accommodate such interests. The most fundamental lesson of civil procedure’s accommodations, however, is that, in contrast both to public law’s strategies for addressing abuse and to prevailing accounts of civil procedure, litigation’s adversarial architecture constrains— and often compromises—the pursuit of public values through the civil justice system in order to respect parties’ competing pursuit of their own personal interests and moral beliefs
Surveying Cyber Espionage: A Growing Threat to Businesses, The Economy, and Our Privacy
No full textAmericans are quick to celebrate the release of new technology each year; and, while advancing technology is exciting, it also creates challenges for American businesses, the U.S. Economy, and Americans’ right to privacy. As more businesses rely on vulnerable technology, cyber espionage raises critical issues such as the exposure of trade secrets, privacy breaches, loss of revenue, and more. This Article first explores the history of cyber espionage, describing major cyberattacks on American businesses and their consequences. It then explains why the legal framework regulating cybercrimes is inadequate due to the increased sophistication of modern cyber spies and their ability to conceal their identities. This Article also advocates for steps the U.S. must take to mitigate future cyber espionage attacks, including updating international laws, encouraging cross-border cooperation, clarifying ambiguities in the current legal framework, and adopting comprehensive privacy laws
How a Central Bank Digital Currency Could Help Curb Tax Evasion and Other Financial Crimes
No full textCentral Bank Digital Currencies are digital currencies issued by the central bank government of a sovereign nation. It is a unique form of payment currently used by just a few countries that has the potential of transforming the US’s current financial landscape. According to the International Monetary Fund, more than 100 countries are currently developing their own central bank digital currencies. The U.S. Federal Reserve solicited comments for what a U.S. CBDC should have. The Biden Administration demonstrated executive support for creating a U.S. CBDC. Several scholars have also recommended design features of a CBDC. This article seeks to examine the potential tax benefits a U.S. CBDC could have on the economy. Tax evasion costs the U.S. $1 trillion. Curbing individual tax evasion can help save millions of dollars in tax revenue. My research will show that designing a U.S. CBDC with certain reporting and withholding functions could help limit the use of fiat currency for tax evasion purposes. And it could further enhance our tax withholding and collection procedure. This will lead to a society where there are less tax cheats and reduced financial crimes. My proposal will show Congress how we can go from the idea of a US CBDC to its reality