Following from sweeping law reforms across the global health landscape, there is a need to prepare the next generation to advance global health law to ensure justice for a healthier world. Educational programs across disciplines have increasingly incorporated the field of global health law, with new courses examining the law and policy frameworks that apply to the new set of public health threats, non-state actors, and regulatory instruments that structure global health. Such interdisciplinary training must be expanded throughout the world to prepare future practitioners to strengthen global health law — ensuring a foundation for global health in legal studies and law and global health studies. Meeting this imperative for global health law teaching — establishing academic courses and textbooks on global legal responses to shared health threats — will be necessary to support students to address the global health challenges of the future.

This Article explores the connections between disability and health justice in service of further tethering the two theories and practices. The author contends that disability should shift from marker of health inequity alone to critical demographic in the analytical and practical application of health justice. This theoretical move creates a more robust understanding of the harms of health injustice, its complexities, and, remedially, reveals underexplored legal and policy pathways to promote health justice.

Talking about one's colleagues is a common practice in all employment settings. In the health care setting, one popular topic of conversation is evaluating and comparing the professional competencies of the various personnel.

When a nurse is aware that a colleague has made an error in judgment, or has failed to follow proper procedure, or has harmed a patient in some way, the nurse often chooses to share this information informally with other colleagues, rather than to report it through official channels. The rationale for this approach is generally that informal talking will do no one harm, while reporting through official channels may bring destructive disciplinary action upon the colleague, result in a lawsuit for defamation against the reporting nurse, or both. The problems with this rationale are illustrated by a recent New York court case.

One of the most significant aspects of P.L. 93-641, the National Health Planning and Resources Development Act of 1974 is the requirement that States adopt certificate of need laws as a method of health facilities regulation. This demonstrates a certain Congressional dissatisfaction with health planning alone and a desire to be more active in the actual distribution of health care facilities.

Over the years Congress has made a number of attempts to institute federal programs that would insure an adequate supply of health services to all people In 1946 it passed the Hill-Burton Act which was designed to respond to Congress perception that an inadequate supply of hospital beds existed in the United Slates. In addition to providing funds for the actual building of hospital beds, Hill-Burton required states to conduct surveys of bedding patterns and to participate in some rudimentary planning.

Although only historians in the future will know, it appears that non-marital and unconventional sexual relations between individuals today are on the increase. One of the more notable landmarks of this trend is the case, Marvin v. Marvin, in which the court recognized the rights of unmarried cohabitants. Individuals now seek wider legal recognition of a variety of interpersonal relationships and, by so doing, are rejecting the limitations of society's traditional agreement, marriage.

This article examines a small subset of the legal interactions and consequences when individuals establish non-marital relationships. Two types of situations and cases will be examined—“reluctant paternity” and the transmission of herpes simplex disease. These may turn out to be unimportant legal curiosities, but they are useful for examining the conflict of rights of privacy and duties of disclosure (right to information) in intimate (here, sexual) interactions between two people. The cases to be examined in detail are in areas of great flux, where a court in one state cites to recently overturned decisions in another state's courts.

Without the use of human subjects in pediatric research, medical science would not have made many of its advances in the diagnosis and treatment of children's diseases. However, scientifically valid experimental trials require healthy subjects as controls and the use of healthy children raises many complex moral and legal questions.

The need to experiment on normal, healthy children has blocked full recognition of their legal rights. Currently, as in the past, parents are allowed to volunteer their children as research subjects by means of “proxy consent.” This doctrine is, however, the only legal justification offered for submitting children to the often potentially damaging procedures they may be subject to as unknowing and perhaps unwilling subjects. While such third party consent appears to satisfy everyone's conscience, its use in non-therapeutic experimentation is inconsistent with established legal principles.

The Report of the Massachusetts Task Force on Organ Transplantation can be described as an incunabulum. This strange word, properly referring to a book produced in the first decades of printing with movable type, literally means “in the cradle.” The Task Force document appears in the infancy of a discussion that is certain to grow: the public policy debate over the allocation of scarce resources. The debate was born several years ago, but until now has either been argued in general terms or by way of administrative devices. The Task Force addresses a quite particular issue: how to or whether to make available to the citizens of the Commonwealth and their neighbors the medical technology of organ transplantation. It approaches the problem with a vivid awareness of the expense of this technology as well as the constraints on health care resources and financing.

The hospital medical record is a multi-purpose document. It is the repository for all relevant (and sometimes not so relevant) medical information concerning the care and treatment of a patient during his or her stay in the hospital or visits to the Out-Patient Department or Emergency Ward. In addition, it serves as a form of communication among all past, present and future providers to help them provide medical care to the patient. With the gradual disappearance of solo practice as a major mode of health care delivery, and with the emergence of group practices, Health Maintenance Organizations, neighborhood health centers and hospital based primary care programs, this communicative function assumes even more importance. As a legal document, its existence is mandated by statute in many states, and it is frequently used as evidence in malpractice suits and other court proceedings. The medical record also serves as a research resource from which statistics and findings can be compiled to aid in a variety of studies and medical audits. Finally, it is an educational document which often is employed as a teaching tool in training students in the health field.

Many modern work environments expose employees to the risk of injury from toxic substances. Attention to this risk may extend beyond the immediate concern for the worker's personal health, to concern that the worker's capacity to produce healthy offspring may be impaired. The conditions of employment in a particular workplace may require exposure to chemical agents that are toxic to the reproductive system of one sex and not of the other, toxic to the reproductive processes in both sexes, toxic to the developing fetus but not to the adult, or a combination of the above. Employers that exclude susceptible members of one sex from the workplace in order to prevent exposure to toxic agents, do so at the risk of violating federal employment discrimination law.

Most nurses not only accept the notion that patients have rights, but also stand ready to help patients assert them. But how far will nurses go? Will they be willing allies as patients press for more recognition of their individuality and autonomy? At the National Conference on Patients' Rights held in Nashville in late September, 1980, I outlined for patient rights activists a five-point agenda for the ‘80s. Since then I have presented this agenda to nursing audiences in Kentucky, Massachusetts, New York, California, and Michigan. The reception has varied, but many nurses are uncomfortable with the proposal. The purpose of this column is to present the agenda in written form to give Nursing Law & Ethics readers an opportunity to comment on it.

Few now question that population health is significantly shaped by social ecology. Power, wealth, and social status clearly matter: Their enactment in daily life makes them fundamental social determinants of health. Important as it is that we accept the broad importance of social factors in health, it is not enough. Our current grasp of the importance of social factors in health has to be strengthened by research that more precisely delineates the workings of social health through social processes, and the investment in research must in turn be vindicated by interventions that make a difference. The work presented in this issue of the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics is intended to advance the agenda for research and action.

An ecological theory puts health everywhere. Population health is shaped in the hierarchies of the workplace, the neighborhood, and the home.

In Kentucky Association of Health Plans, Inc. v. Miller,, the Supreme Court unanimously held that states’ “any willing provider” laws are not preempted by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA). The Court ruled that states can regulate their health maintenance organizations (HMOs), and thus upheld a Kentucky law that requires insurers to reimburse services of any health care provider who is willing and able to meet established criteria. The Supreme Court has heard several cases related to ERISA in the last few years, and other such cases are working their way through the court system. Coupled with this most recent decision in Miller, the Supreme Court may significantly alter the shape of the insurance industry.