Health Law and BioEthics

Seminar – 2 units. This seminar examines health and health care through a social justice lens. It focuses on health risks disproportionately experienced by marginalized communities and individuals. The course critically assesses the role of law in both maintaining and challenging structural inequalities that allocate health risks, impose barriers to health care, and impair quality of care. While the course focuses on health care law, it also addresses the interactions between health law and other areas of law (e.g. immigration law).

Final Assessment: Paper

Seminar – 2 units. As California moves into its second decade of criminal justice reform, we now turn our focus to how those with mental health conditions interact with law enforcement and the justice system. This class will explore the work of crisis intervention teams, collaborative courts, and California's new CARE courts. Our effort will build on a foundational study of competency, insanity, protections under the Americans with Disabilities Act, hospital holds, forced medication, and conservatorships. Special attention will be given to children and the elderly.

Seminar - 2 hours. This course explores current topics at the crossroads of neuroscience and the law.  The course introduces foundational bioethics and some basics of cognitive science.  It examines the relationship between social science and the law, notably how empirical research findings are used to design legal institutions.  It considers the role of scientific models of human cognition and motivation in the context of legal policy creation or sentencing decisions.

Discussion - 3 hours.  This course examines the ethical, legal, and social issues that arise from research on and use of biomedical technologies.  The course introduces and critically evaluates the dominant principlist approach to Western bioethics. It uses interdisciplinary methods, including critical theory and science and technology studies to consider the role of law on issues arising from biotechnology and science-based knowledge systems that implicate social norms and personal values.

Discussion - 3 hours.  The course addresses law and policy issues in health care financing and access to health care. Course materials and discussion draw from current events as well as case law, statutes and regulations. Course design contextualizes issues to surface role of structural, institutional, and cultural inequalities in health care.

Seminar - 2 hrs. Public health law, seen broadly, is the government's power and responsibility to ensure the conditions for the population's health. The use of this power results in a series of trade-offs between the collective good of public health and the individual's interests in liberty and property. We will look at the debate over paternalism, as well as issues raised by methods such as surveillance, health education campaigns, immunization and testing, quarantine, and criminal prosecution.

Seminar - 3 units. This course uses both reproductive rights and reproductive justice frameworks. It also incorporates critical race and feminist theory to examine a wide range of laws and practices that impact reproductive rights in the United States.