29,111 research outputs found
Chapter 10: MD Anderson Head & Neck Surgery Advances with Dental Oncology, Plastic Surgery and Neurosurgery
No full textDr. Byers talks about the role of dental oncology under Dr. Joe B. Drane, Head of UT Dental Branch/Dental Oncology, and the work done by Drs. James (Jim) C. Lemon and Jack W. Martin in managing dental problems with radiotherapy patients and fabrication of dental prostheses (ears, noses, dentures, swallowing apparatus). He then discusses the “free flap” plastic surgical method, and ENT/plastic surgery doctors Stephen S. Kroll, Mark A. Schusterman, Geoffrey L. Robb and David L. Larson who performed the surgery. Finally he mentions the role of neurosurgery, praises Neurosurgical Drs. Milam Leavens and Ray Sawaya, and finally discusses the Head & Neck department’s prominence in terms of MD Anderson case admission volume.https://openworks.mdanderson.org/surgeryhist_interviewchapters/1020/thumbnail.jp
MDL as Public Administration
Full text linkFrom the Deepwater Horizon disaster to the opioid crisis, multidistrict litigation—or simply MDL—has become the preeminent forum for devising solutions to the most difficult problems in the federal courts. MDL works by refusing to follow a regular procedural playbook. Its solutions are case specific, evolving, and ad hoc. This very flexibility, however, provokes charges that MDL violates basic requirements of the rule of law.
At the heart of these charges is the assumption that MDL is simply a larger version of the litigation that takes place every day in federal district courts. But MDL is not just different in scale than ordinary litigation; it is different in kind. In structure and operation, MDL parallels programs like Social Security in which an administrative agency continuously develops new procedures to handle a high volume of changing claims. Accordingly, MDL is appropriately judged against the “administrative” rule of law that emerged in the decades after World War II and underpins the legitimacy of the modern administrative state.
When one views MDL as an administrative program instead of a larger version of ordinary civil litigation, the real threats to its legitimacy come into focus. The problem is not that MDL is ad hoc. Rather, it is that MDL lacks the guarantees of transparency, public participation, and ex post review that administrative agencies have operated under since the middle of the twentieth century. The history of the administrative state suggests that MDL’s continued success as a forum for resolving staggeringly complex problems depends on how it addresses these governance deficits
OncoLog, Volume 45, Number 09, September 2000
Full text linkMultidisciplinary Care Improves Treatment, Enhances Quality of Life for Patients with Colorectal Cancer DiaLog: Treating Cancer with a Team Approach, by David L. Callender, MD, Senior Vice President and Chief Medical Officer Cervical Cancer Prevention: Could Spectroscopy Steal the Spot light ? Virtual Colonoscopy a Potential Screening Reality Protocols: Clinical Trials for Colorectal Cancer Compass: Clinical Practice Guidelines House Call: Sharing Personal Stories: Books Written by People with Cancerhttps://openworks.mdanderson.org/oncolog/1088/thumbnail.jp
The New Conflicts Law
No full textThe deterrent and remedial power of civil litigation in U.S. courts is justifiably famous. But as Kiobel and other cases underscore, such litigation is only one of many possible ways to regulate harms that affect multiple sovereigns. Globalization, increased cross-border activity, and the lightweight limits on extraterritorial jurisdiction imposed by international law combine to create an environment in which it is common for multiple legal systems to regulate a single course of conduct. When sovereigns disagree over how to regulate harm, the ensuing conflicts expose U.S. legal systems to a new and unfamiliar form of political backlash.
This Article identifies, explains, and critically analyzes a new body of law that responds to these conflicts in a novel and problematic way. Beginning in the 1980s and accelerating in recent terms, the Supreme Court has interpreted indeterminate legal materials that are not obviously about regulatory conflict to create a set of clear, ex ante rules restricting private regulatory enforcement in U.S. courts. This set of rules--"the new conflicts law"-- prevents conflicts between domestic litigation and other nations' approaches to regulating harm and transfers authority for regulatory conflict from frontline decisionmakers to the U.S. Supreme Court. But in seeking to limit interference with foreign regulation, the new law undermines U.S. regulatory systems with no clear welfare payoff. And it often precludes democratically accountable policymakers from revisiting the Supreme Court's conclusions about the appropriate relationship between U.S. litigation and foreign regulation.
To address these concerns, the Article proposes incremental changes to four doctrines within the new conflicts law. The more basic and urgent task, however, is to recognize the new conflicts law for the significant development it is. With little fanfare, the Supreme Court has dramatically changed the way in which the U.S. legal system manages regulatory conflict
Regulating Arbitration
No full textEnabled by Supreme Court decisions that grant contract drafters broad authority over the procedures used to resolve legal claims, agreements to arbitrate have proliferated in consumer and employment contracts. As arbitration has spread, so have demands for Congress and federal administrative agencies to regulate it. But when does arbitration warrant regulation through new legislation and administrative action? The most prominent policy arguments for regulating arbitration focus on its effects on consumer welfare and democratic governance. By and large, the standard policy arguments for regulating arbitration do not grapple with arbitration’s effects on specific regulatory statutes.
This Article explains arbitration’s effects on the implementation and enforcement of federal regulatory statutes and argues that controlling these effects should be a central focus of efforts to regulate arbitration through new legislation and agency action. In hundreds of statutes, Congress has created financial incentives for private litigants to enforce its laws. The enactment of incentives for private civil litigation allows litigants to assert claims that would be too expensive to prosecute under ordinary procedural rules, and, more importantly, allows Congress to calibrate enforcement of federal law. By establishing stronger incentives for private enforcement of a statute—e.g., provisions that shift attorneys’ fees to successful plaintiffs and provide enhanced damages—Congress drives enforcement of the statute. By providing weaker incentives, Congress directs enforcement elsewhere.
Arbitration can dramatically alter the returns from enforcement of statutes with incentives for private civil litigation. In doing so, it may subvert or completely undermine congressional efforts to mobilize and calibrate private enforcement of federal law. These “enforcement effects” threaten Congress’s ability to accomplish substantive regulatory objectives through private civil litigation but have received only passing attention in discussions about the policy response to arbitration. To illustrate how greater attention to them would impact efforts to regulate arbitration, the Article analyzes the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s proposed arbitration regulation under § 1028 of the Dodd-Frank Act and shows how it falls short of ensuring that certain consumer financial protection laws administered by the agency are enforced in the manner and to the extent contemplated by Congress.The publication agreement authorizes me to post this article on the university repositor
What do MDL leaders do?: evidence from leadership appointment orders
No full textIn federal multidistrict litigation (MDL), district courts regularly appoint attorneys to manage the litigation of cases that are transferred to a single district court for coordinated pretrial proceedings. Orders appointing MDL leaders serve as a constitution or charter for a particular MDL, reallocating functions that otherwise would be performed by individually retained plaintiff’s attorneys to court-appointed leaders. As such, they perform a crucial role in the “MDL model” of aggregate litigation and settlement. Yet in spite of their importance, knowledge of these orders is mostly folk wisdom.
This Article, prepared for the Pound Civil Justice Institute symposium on "Class Actions, Mass Torts, and MDLs: The Next 50 Years," presents preliminary findings from a study of leadership appointment orders in all MDLs pending in the federal courts in June 2019. The principal finding is that, while leadership appointment orders are a standard feature of contemporary MDL, they vary significantly in how they structure plaintiff’s leadership, the functions they assign to court-appointed leaders, and how orders conceive of the relationships among court-appointed leaders, non-lead attorneys, and MDL plaintiffs. These findings shed light on debates over the nature of contemporary MDL, the duties court-appointed leaders owe to non-client plaintiffs, and the costs and benefits of MDL’s dependence on decentralized, ad hoc procedure-making
Arbitration Conflicts
No full textAmong the most important recent developments in U.S. civil procedure is the rise of arbitration as a substitute for litigation in public courts. Seeking to lower legal costs and protect themselves from entrepreneurial litigation, firms from Amazon to Wells Fargo have added arbitration clauses to their standard form contracts and invoked them to defend against all manner of litigation. Increased use of arbitration--underpinned by the Supreme Court's view that the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) requires arbitration agreements to be enforced according to their terms--has transformed arbitration from a method for resolving contractual differences into an all-purpose private justice system.
In this new environment, regulation by federal administrative agencies has emerged as a crucial check against the most problematic uses of arbitration. But agencies' efforts to regulate arbitration have been plagued by persistent questions about the extent of their statutory authority to do so. Those questions have played a central role in the Trump administration’s efforts to roll back Obama-era arbitration regulations, as agencies cited doubts about their statutory authority to justify reversing Obama-era rules. And the issue has divided courts. In its first encounter with an agency arbitration regulation, the Supreme Court in Epic Systems v. Lewis divided sharply over the lawfulness of a National Labor Relations Board ruling that regulated arbitral class action waivers under the National Labor Relations Act.
This Article offers a theory of how the FAA relates to other federal laws, the legal issue at the heart of conflicts over agency arbitration revolution. That theory of the FAA proceeds from two basic propositions: (1) the FAA establishes default rules governing the status and enforceability of arbitration agreements; and (2) whether another law modifies the FAA’s background commands presents an ordinary question of statutory interpretation. The FAA is not, on any accepted theory of statutory interpretation, a "super-statute" that occupies a special position in federal law.
This theory challenges several common assumptions about the law governing arbitration. Under ordinary interpretive principles, the FAA's default rules of dispute resolution procedure are not only modified by statutes that expressly address the validity, enforceability, or revocability of arbitration agreements--a point that is generally accepted in doctrine and scholarship--but also by a range of statutes that modify the FAA impliedly. Among those statutes are laws governing primary conduct, laws that define procedures and remedies for statutory claims, laws that subject regulated parties' contracting to administrative oversight, and laws that direct an agency to implement subsidiary statutory policies that are negatively affected by arbitration. Between them, these statutes supply authority for many contested agency arbitration regulations. But in contrast to much of the scholarly literature, this Article demonstrates that the issue is not governed by Chevron USA Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc
Constitutional Evasion and the Confrontation Puzzle
No full textOne of the most notable developments in contemporary constitutional law is the breakdown of jurisprudence interpreting the Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2004 decision in Crawford v. Washington. There, the Court promised doctrine that faithfully applied the Clause’s original meaning, was simple to administer, and protected criminal defendants against convictions secured through suspect evidence. Post-Crawford case law has not delivered on these promises. This Article argues that Crawford’s failure reflects an unsuccessful attempt to regulate evasion of the Confrontation Clause. Though justified by the Court on originalist grounds, the rule of Crawford, holding that “testimonial” evidence triggers a right to confront the responsible “witness,” is best understood as an attempt to regulate governmental evasion of the basic Sixth Amendment right to confront witnesses who give live testimony in legal proceedings. The need for doctrine that performs this function results from the transformation in evidence between the framing and present day. The Crawford Court, however, did not acknowledge the need to regulate evasion of the basic confrontation right, nor did it grapple with important policy questions a legal policymaker regulating evasion of the law must address. This account: (1) suggests a reorientation of confrontation doctrine that would permit the Court to overcome the uncertainty that plagues post-Crawford jurisprudence; (2) suggests a decision tree for courts considering whether and how to regulate seemingly evasive activities; and (3) contributes new data to the long-running debate between “pragmatist” and “doctrinalist” scholars over the utility of identifying a separate category of doctrine that implements constitutional norms as opposed to elaborating the Constitution’s textual and historical meaning
Response: Public Litigation, Private Arbitration?
No full textHow should legal disputes be allocated between litigation and arbitration? Given strong incentives for many actors to arbitrate everything, the question turns fundamentally on the scope of arbitration under the applicable law. In "Re-Inventing Arbitration: How Expanding the Scope of Arbitration Is Re-Shaping Its Form and Blurring the Line Between Private and Public Adjudication," Professor Deborah Hensler and Damira Khatam posit that the "public" or "private" nature of a dispute provides the key to whether it belongs in arbitration. While arbitration of private disputes is ok, disputes with "public policy dimensions" belong in the courts. Hensler and Khatam therefore suggest that Congress override Supreme Court decisions mandating arbitration of employment and consumer disputes, which, they contend, would restore domestic arbitration to its proper sphere.
But can disputes really be divided into public and private categories that provide the key to whether they belong in arbitration? This Response suggests that on close examination it is exceedingly difficult to identify a reliable proxy for the public or private nature of a dispute. The absence of such a proxy suggests there is an inescapably political dimension to how disputes are allocated between litigation and arbitration. Whether a category of disputes should be heard in a public court because the disputes impact the public interest turns out to depend on contested judgments about where the public interest lies. This, in turn, suggests a more fundamental reason for Congress to revisit the scope of arbitration under the Federal Arbitration Act. If the allocation of disputes between litigation and arbitration is an inescapably political question, it should ideally be addressed by an institution accountable to democratic politics.A response to the paper: Hensler, D. & Khatam, D. (2018). "Re-Inventing Arbitration: How Expanding the Scope of Arbitration Is Re-Shaping Its Form and Blurring the Line Between Private and Public Adjudication," Nevada Law Journal 18
Arbitration conflicts
No full textAmong the most important recent developments in U.S. civil procedure is the rise of arbitration as a substitute for litigation in public courts. Seeking to lower legal costs and protect themselves from entrepreneurial litigation, firms from Amazon to Wells Fargo have added arbitration clauses to their standard form contracts and invoked them to defend against all manner of litigation. Increased use of arbitration--underpinned by the Supreme Court's view that the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) requires arbitration agreements to be enforced according to their terms--has transformed arbitration from a method for resolving contractual differences into an all-purpose private justice system.
In this new environment, regulation by federal administrative agencies has emerged as a crucial check against the most problematic uses of arbitration. But agencies' efforts to regulate arbitration have been plagued by persistent questions about the extent of their statutory authority to do so. Those questions have played a central role in the Trump administration’s efforts to roll back Obama-era arbitration regulations, as agencies cited doubts about their statutory authority to justify reversing Obama-era rules. And the issue has divided courts. In its first encounter with an agency arbitration regulation, the Supreme Court in Epic Systems v. Lewis divided sharply over the lawfulness of a National Labor Relations Board ruling that regulated arbitral class action waivers under the National Labor Relations Act.
This Article offers a theory of how the FAA relates to other federal laws, the legal issue at the heart of conflicts over agency arbitration revolution. That theory of the FAA proceeds from two basic propositions: (1) the FAA establishes default rules governing the status and enforceability of arbitration agreements; and (2) whether another law modifies the FAA’s background commands presents an ordinary question of statutory interpretation. The FAA is not, on any accepted theory of statutory interpretation, a "super-statute" that occupies a special position in federal law.
This theory challenges several common assumptions about the law governing arbitration. Under ordinary interpretive principles, the FAA's default rules of dispute resolution procedure are not only modified by statutes that expressly address the validity, enforceability, or revocability of arbitration agreements--a point that is generally accepted in doctrine and scholarship--but also by a range of statutes that modify the FAA impliedly. Among those statutes are laws governing primary conduct, laws that define procedures and remedies for statutory claims, laws that subject regulated parties' contracting to administrative oversight, and laws that direct an agency to implement subsidiary statutory policies that are negatively affected by arbitration. Between them, these statutes supply authority for many contested agency arbitration regulations. But in contrast to much of the scholarly literature, this Article demonstrates that the issue is not governed by Chevron USA Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc
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