Annual Fall CLE Event Spotlights McKinney Health Law Experts
10/18/2019
The IU McKinney School of Law hosted “Health Law Responses to Crisis and Change,” as part of their annual Continuing Legal Education event on October 8 featuring law faculty raising important legal, health and public policy issues.
In his lecture, “Hepatitis C Litigation: Using Prisoner Rights to Promote Public Health,” IU McKinney Professor Robert Katz (left) drew lessons from several federal class actions that seek to compel state prison officials to treat all inmates who are chronically infected with the hepatitis C virus (HCV). Professor Katz is co-counsel in one such action, Stafford v. Carter, which was brought against the Indiana Department of Correction (IDOC). In September 2018, a federal court held that IDOC's failure to provide treatment violates the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
Professor Katz argued that courts should not determine an inmate’s access to treatment based on whether such access will improve population health, be it the health of society at large, or the health of the inmate population as a whole. Rather, courts should decide the question within the individual rights framework of the Eighth Amendment and the Bill of Rights more generally.
In their presentation, “The Opioid Overdose Crisis: Science, Policy and Law,” IU McKinney faculty Nicolas P. Terry
(left) and Aila Hoss (below) teamed with Tracy Gunter, M.D., Professor of Clinical Psychiatry, IU School of Medicine.
Professor Terry, Hall Render Professor of Law and Executive Director of the Hall Center for Law and Health, provided an update to the overdose epidemic and opioid litigation, noting that while declines in deaths from drug overdoses in some states, “has tended to encourage a ‘mission accomplished’ feeling,” the crisis is “still very much there.”
Among the other presenters:
- IU McKinney Law alumnus G. Michael Witte, ’82, Executive Director, Indiana Disciplinary Committee, presented an Indiana ethics update.
- “Strange Bedfellows: When the U.S. Department of Justice Moves Dismiss Relator Qui Tams Against Pharma,” with Veronica Lei, Assistant General Counsel, Litigation and Legal Compliance, Eli Lilly and Co., and Sara L. Shudofsky, Partner, Arnold & Porter.
- “Overview of Key Data Protection Laws in the U.S. and Abroad and Program Implementation Considerations for Multi-National Companies,” with Audrey Mills, Chief Privacy Officer, and Jessica Mijares-Campo, Privacy Counsel, Eli Lilly and Co.
- A presentation, “Can the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act Survive the 21st Century?” by Ralph Hall, Principal, Leavitt Partners; Professor of Practice, University of Minnesota Law School.
