Foundational Courses

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), better known as health care reform, is the most important and controversial piece of federal social legislation of this generation. It is also basically an insurance regulatory statute. PPACA establishes a new and complex set of rules governing the operation of the health insurance industry, provides consumers with important rights with respect to access to medical care and imposes obligations with respect to health insurance on both businesses and individuals. The course will look at PPACA and the issues that surrounded its enactment--issues which continue to fuel debate over whether it should modified or repealed. This will be done as part of an examination of the regulatory rules that govern all of insurance industry's products (annuities, auto, home owners' product liability, life insurance, etc). The course also takes a look at the insurance industry's structure and financial performance and at the competitive interactions between the insurance, banking and securities industries. The impact on the industry of the financial crisis of 2008 and the resulting Dodd-Frank reform legislation will be reviewed.

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This course will cover issues that arise in clinical healthcare settings, primarily involving who decides and on what basis. Topics include: informed consent and materiality; competence and capacity to give consent; surrogates, advanced directives, physicians orders, and powers of attorney; end-of-life decision making, including withholding/removing treatment, euthanasia, and physician-assisted suicide; clinical ethics committees; patient confidentiality and duties to disclose; human subjects research and institutional review boards; physician conflicts of interest; pre-approval access to drugs; and rationing of scarce healthcare resources.

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SPRG 2026: LAW JD 727 A1, Jan 12th to Apr 22nd 2026

Public health seeks to prevent unnecessary illness, injury, and death, which law can either facilitate or thwart. The field is transforming from state programs that prevent disease in populations (e.g., vaccination, newborn screening) to federal and international efforts to broadly recognize a population and individual "right to health." This course explores contemporary examples of public health problems such as disasters and emergencies, firearms regulation, regulating commercial speech to prevent consumer deception, and reproductive health. The course offers a framework for identifying and controlling health risks drawing on principles and theories of law, assessment of risk, policy evaluation, and empirical evidence. We will consider how laws at the state and federal levels regulate personal behaviors and products as well as impact the underlying determinants of health. Students will analyze different legal strategies that can be used to guide public health such as governmental nudges through funding, criminal and civil prohibitions, data collection and privacy, marketing restrictions, and taxation.

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SPRG 2026: LAW JD 926 A1, Jan 12th to Apr 22nd 2026