Health Law

Under What Circumstances Can a State Compel a Pharmacy to Provide “Morning After” Drugs Against the Religious Objections of Pharmacists?

  • by Vikram David Amar and Professor Alan Brownstein

Much attention has been directed toward the asserted clashes between the federal government’s recently adopted policies concerning health insurance coverage for contraceptive services, on the one hand, and religious liberties, on the other.  But state laws and policies present just as much, if not more, potential for infringement of religious liberties.  In the present column, we analyze a recent case from the state of Washington that sheds important light on the current state of the constitutional right to the free exercise of religion, and that also illustrates many of the big u

The High Court Needn’t Worry About Sliding Downhill: An Evaluation of the “Slippery Slope” Concerns Expressed at the Oral Argument in the Challenge to the Mandate Provision of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare)

  • by Vikram David Amar

Now that the dust is settling from the Supreme Court's oral arguments held two weeks ago in the challenge to the Affordable Care Act (ACA)-known by critics and some supporters as "Obamacare"-analysts are looking back on the questions and concerns raised by various Justices to see what the road ahead might or should look like.  In my column today, I address one of the key features of the oral argument landscape-the (to my mind, unwarranted) fear of a slippery slope that the individual mandate provision seemed to engender.

The “Other” Case This Term Testing Congress’ Enumerated Powers to Pass a Healthcare Law: Coleman v. Court of Appeals of Maryland and FMLA

  • by Vikram David Amar

These days, all eyes are (understandably) focused on the recently concluded Supreme Court oral arguments in the challenge to the Affordable Care Act.  Yet the Justices quietly handed down another case in the last few weeks, Coleman v. Court of Appeals of Maryland, in which the central attack on a federal statute was in some respects similar to the attack on Obamacare.  Both cases raise the central question whether Congress lacked enumerated power to pass a particular statute.

Small-town "justice" run amok?

  • by Lisa Pruitt

I have been intrigued by the attention national media have given this week to a criminal trial in West Texas.  Ann Mitchell, an administrative nurse at the community hospital in Winkler County, went on trial in state court charged with "misuse of official information," a third-degree felony that carried a possible fine of $10,000 and up to 10 years in prison.  The charges stemmed from an anonymous letter that Mitchell and another administrative nurse wrote to the Texas Medical Board.  In it, they

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