Mastering the Chargemaster: Minimizing Price-Gouging and Exposing the Structural Flaws in the Healthcare "Market"

In his seminal article, Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,1 Steven Brill recounts stories of Americans of modest to comfortable means, whose lives were turned upside-down, not just by tragic illness; but, by the cost of the cure.

Front Matter

The Pittsburgh Journal of Environmental and Public Health Law (PJEPHL) is published annually by the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh under the editorial control of students of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, 3900 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. PJEPHL can be contacted by email at [email protected]. PJEPHL is freely available to readers worldwide at http://pjephl.law.pitt.edu. PJEPHL is printed by Western Newspaper Publishing Co., Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana. Copyright for each work contained in this issue is retained by the author and under a Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Statutory Requirements for Artificial Insemination: A Sperm Donor's Fight to Let Go of His Rights

In 2009, an auto-mechanic from Topeka, Kansas by the name of William Marotta answered a Craigslist ad posted by Angela Bauer and Jennifer Schreiner, a lesbian couple seeking a private sperm donor for artificial insemination.

Cloud Computing and the NSA: The Carbon Footprint of the Secret Servers

Edward Snowden took the world by storm when he exposed the data collection practices of the National Security Agency, known to many as the NSA. Much ink has been spilled on the constitutionality of such practices and the scope of its surveillance yet the cloud computing that facilitates such surveillance often goes unmentioned, if not unnoticed.

Regulators Throughout American History Have Been Reluctant To Regulate Cigars And The FDA Still Is Today, But Why?

In this article I explore the history of cigar regulation, going back to colonial times, yet focusing on the current regulatory climate. I review the different regulations imposed on tobacco products throughout American history, concluding that government regulators were never particularly serious about regulating tobacco products until the release of the 1964 Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking and Health. However, I point out that this Report was so obsessed with the health hazards of cigarettes that it actually had the unintended consequence of promoting In the long run the increased consumption of cigars. Today, health organizations show intense frustration with the FDA’s current refusal to regulate cigars, even though the 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act gave the FDA regulatory jurisdiction over cigars. But applying a totality of circumstances test, looking at the politics, economics, and even the lack of enough credible health studies on cigars, I conclude, somewhat surprisingly, that there are very good reasons why the FDA should probably not at this time jump into the regulatory arena and impose the same sort of tough regulations on cigars as imposed on cigarettes.

On a Common Road Towards Sustainable Biofuels? EU and U.S. Approaches to Regulating Biofuels

N/A

Kivalina at the Supreme Court: A Lost Opportunity for Federal Common Law

This article discusses the status of federal common law in the wake of the Supreme Court's May, 2013 denial of petitioners' writ of certiorari in Native Village of Kivalina v. Exxonmobil. A close reading of Supreme Court and recent appellate decisions on federal common law as applied to transboundary pollution reveals three views on the availability and function of federal common law where a federal statute addresses a category of environmental harms: presumptive displacement of federal common law when a federal statute creates a regulatory approach, presumptive coexistence of federal statutory and common law where a federal statute does not provide relief for injuries alleged under common law, and case-by-case balancing of the interfering effect of federal common law against the injuries left unaddressed by federal statutory law. The Court’s current approach resides somewhere between presumptive displacement and case-by-case balancing, and although the Court offers various rationales for this approach in its latest federal common law opinion, the most convincing of these is that cases involving transboundary pollution, particularly those alleging global warming-induced injury, are cumbersome for federal courts to handle as common law matters. Allocation of judicial resources is within the Supreme Court's discretion to consider in rejecting a case, but it is a far more pragmatic than principled rationale, and thus less than satisfying as a court’s primary reason for denying relief. A more principled approach, advocated by Justices Stevens and Blackmun in dissents to two key federal common law cases, is that the displacement analysis should begin with the premise that the judicial system aims, first and foremost, to compensate the injured, and that a federal common law claim should be displaced only where the legislative-regulatory regime covering the subject of a common law claim directly addresses the injury alleged under common law.

Front Matter

N/A

The World’s Laws in American Justice: The Foreign Law Provisions of the 2008 Lacey Act Amendments

No Abstract

Collaborative Law in Pennsylvania and the Frozen Embryo Debate

No Abstract