Care robots are already assisting the elderly in some nursing homes around the globe and could be in widespread use in hospitals and homes sooner than we think. These robots promise great hope for patients: to help them remain independent, to provide assistance with daily living, to comfort and distract during procedures, to educate, and to be companions during the vulnerable and lonely times in patient lives. Yet, care robots will have unprecedented access to personal lives, combined with designs aimed at winning patient trust and affection, and with recording and sensory capabilities beyond any human. They pose significant risk to privacy, autonomy, and confidentiality, three patient interests integral to preserving trust in the medical system. Regulation of care robots will be necessary to safeguard patient interests and trust and in order for patients to tolerate care robots. This article proposes a regulatory framework for care robots addressing four key stakeholders involved in care robot governance: the providers and institutions that deploy care robots, the manufacturers of such robots, and government agencies. The article proposes some practical, concrete steps that each stakeholder can take now to begin to prepare for a future with care robots.
Throughout U.S. legal education’s history, a small number of elite law schools have produced the vast majority of law professors. Although law professor hiring is now more inclusive in certain respects, the law school an aspiring professor attended continues to serve as a powerful predictor of hiring market success. Some scholars have maintained that this preference for graduates of elite law schools infects legal education with class bias and distorts legal pedagogy, but the absence of reliable data on socioeconomic diversity within law schools has muted these criticisms. This Essay reorients the debate on law school hiring by focusing on law professors’ undergraduate educations. This shift in focus is important for two main reasons. First, researchers have gathered reliable socioeconomic data on the student bodies of U.S. colleges, data that do not currently exist for law schools. Second, undergraduate education does not provide legal training or otherwise prepare students for legal academia and therefore should play little to no role in hiring. Drawing on entry-level hiring information from the last three years, I find that new law professors graduated predominately from elite private colleges that serve the wealthiest strata of U.S. society. The median hire attended a college in which 67% of students come from families in the top income quintile, and only a fraction of students come from families in the bottom three quintiles. Whatever professors’ individual backgrounds, beginning in college they are socialized in highly privileged environments that shape their pedagogy and research. This Essay concludes by describing legal education’s marginalization of non-elite views of the legal system and suggesting that hiring practices should be restructured to allow for a more socioeconomically diverse professoriate.
The United States currently ranks last among high-income countries for life expectancy. Since 2014, U.S. life expectancy has declined. By now, these alarming trends are well known to researchers, the public, and policymakers. Nevertheless, there is no consensus among researchers on the causes of the trends, and there has been no serious and effective bipartisan effort to solve the problem. The dominant narrative has implicated Americans' behaviors, such as smoking, illicit drug use, and suicide; yet, this narrative is misguided and counterproductive. It also exonerates the key structural drivers of behaviors and health, namely the U.S. policy context and the outsized influence of corporations and big donors on those policies. The U.S. policy context has changed dramatically since the 1970s, particularly at the state level. State policies have hyperpolarized along partisan lines. These changes have likely had a profound impact on nearly every aspect of Americans' lives, cutting short many of them. Consequently, this Essay argues that state policies increasingly affect life and death in the United States. It raises concerns about how the polarization of state policies will further deteriorate the health of many Americans. It points to three significant forces behind the polarization and the growing importance of state policy contexts on Americans' lives-(1) New Federalism; (2) the new type of state preemption laws; and (3) the emergence of organizations, such as the American Legislative Exchange Council, through which corporations and big donors influence policies.
This Article challenges the view that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has exclusive jurisdiction over life sciences innovations. Many current and forthcoming life sciences innovations are “innovative therapies” such as gene editing, gene therapy, and regenerative stem cell treatments, which are actually “hybrids” of state and federal jurisdiction. Thus, both state and federal jurisdiction coexist: federal jurisdiction exists to the extent that these medical innovations use drugs or biologics, but state jurisdiction exists to the extent that these innovations are procedures regulated by states as the practice of medicine. This Article argues that the regulation of numerous current and forthcoming innovative therapies requires the recognition of a state-federal partnership—not only because both federal and state jurisdiction already coexist but also because a cooperative form of shared governance would improve the transparency and quality of regulation. This Article provides a structural framework for that shared governance that draws on existing federal-state cooperative programs and applies the advantages of cooperative federalism, with an emphasis on often neglected actors in the realm of regulating innovative therapies: states. Incorporating this Article’s cooperative structural framework would (1) curtail the federal usurpation of state jurisdiction, (2) minimize the significance of the FDA’s resource shortage by complementing federal regulation, and (3) reduce the likelihood that the FDA would continue to unlawfully incorporate political and social motivations into its decision-making process. Applying this Article’s cooperative framework would also serve to recognize the continued existence of both state and federal jurisdiction over innovative therapies.
Numerous federal statutes rely on a distinction between employees and independent contractors. Based on a series of Supreme Court decisions from 1968 through 2003, courts and administrative agencies have used a common law multifactor test to draw this distinction. In an effort to enhance predictability and certainty within and across legislation, these cases have rejected a purposive approach in applying the test. But the Supreme Court has never said which, if any, of the factors are the most important in the analysis, nor has anyone determined whether the underlying purpose—enhancing predictability and certainty—has been attained. This empirical Study uses content analysis to answer these questions. First, based on a variety of statistics, it determines which factors are the most and least important under several federal statutory schemes. Next, it calculates the factors’ accuracies and compares the results to determine if there is consistency within and across the legislation and whether predictability and certainty have been achieved. Concluding that predictability and certainty have not been achieved using the common law multifactor test, this Article proposes and evaluates reform efforts to solve, or at least reduce, the inconsistency problem while still achieving the goals of the legislation.
