New Rules Requiring Accessible Medical Diagnostic Equipment-Updates to Section 504 Disability Civil Rights Regulations.

This Viewpoint reviews the history of mandates governing access to medical diagnostic equipment in Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and reviews the new rules.

How Should a Medical-Legal Partnership Address Unique Needs of People With Criminal Legal System Involvement?

Medical-legal partnerships (MLPs) are well suited to address health-harming legal needs associated with the collateral consequences of mass incarceration in the United States, such as those that limit access to food, housing, employment, and family reunification postrelease. MLP innovations seek to expand the current model to address patients' criminal, as well as postrelease, civil legal needs by including community health workers and some patients as legal partners and creating coalitions to promote local and state policy change. Overall, this article explains how these MLP innovations can support rights of people returning to communities after incarceration and can be leveraged to mitigate criminal legal system involvement.

Sieyès's Constitutional Jury, the Pennsylvania Council of Censors, and the Debate on the Conservative Power in the French Revolution.

Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès's 1795 proposal for a Constitutional Jury is usually portrayed as the first proposal for an institution to control the constitutionality of laws, and thus the ancestor of the modern constitutional court. Challenging this view, this article resituates the Constitutional Jury in a broader transatlantic tradition concerned with creating a conservative power, a non-judicial and explicitly political constitutional guardian, and demonstrates the influence of the 1776 Pennsylvania Council of Censors on Sieyès's Constitutional Jury. Drawing upon the insights provided by this tradition, it then reevaluates the history of constitutionalism and the contemporary crisis of constitutional guardianship.

Privileges, Immunities, and Affirmative Action in Medical Education.

In Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, the Supreme Court ruled that affirmative action in university admissions, in which an applicant of a particular race or ethnicity receives a plus factor, is unconstitutional. This ruling was based on both the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This article argues that a more natural fit as the basis for constitutional analysis would be a different clause in the Fourteenth Amendment, the Privileges or Immunities Clause. In the article, a legal analysis based on the clause is applied to medical school admissions. Depending on whether a fundamental rights reading or an antidiscrimination (equality) reading of the clause is applied, opposite conclusions are reached on the constitutionality of affirmative action in medical school admissions. This analysis demonstrates why affirmative action in admissions--in this case medical school admissions, which directly affect the composition of the Nation's physician workforce--is a complex and difficult constitutional question.

Echoes from the past: How America's major moments shaped mental health policies through a young adult lens.

This commentary examines key mental health policies across four transformative historical periods in America: the aftermath of World War II (1939-1946), the Civil Rights Movement (1954-1968), the Great Recession (2007-2009), and the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-2023). The post-WWII era established today's foundational mental health system, emphasizing military personnel, as reflected in the National Mental Health Act of 1946. During the Civil Rights Movement, the focus shifted toward community equality, leading to the Community Mental Health Act of 1963. The economic challenges of the Great Recession, especially affecting young adults, prompted a deep dive into the Affordable Care Act. The social isolation and economic suffering from the COVID-19 pandemic led to the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. The article highlights the need for a more inclusive policy development approach, one that recognizes and integrates the unique perspectives of young adults in shaping mental health policies and discourse. It concludes with recommendations to guide future policy evolution for enhanced mental health and societal well-being. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Battling Environmental Racism in Cancer Alley: A Legislative Approach.

This Paper argues that to protect at-risk communities - and all Americans - from the deadly effects of environmental racism, Congress must pass the Environmental Justice for All Act. The Act is intended to "restore, reaffirm, and reconcile environmental justice and civil rights." It does so by restoring an individual's right to sue in federal court for discrimination based on race, ethnicity, or national origin regardless of intent under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, strengthening the National Environmental Policy Act, and providing economic incentives focused on environmental justice.

Church Against State: How Industry Groups Lead the Religious Liberty Assault on Civil Rights, Healthcare Policy, and the Administrative State.

Industry-funded religious liberty legal groups have sought to undermine healthcare policy and law while simultaneously attacking the rights of sexual and gender minorities. Whereas past scholarship has tracked religiously-affiliated healthcare providers' growing political power and attendant transformations to legal doctrine, our account emphasizes the political donors and visionaries who have leveraged religious providers and the U.S. healthcare system's delegated structure to transform social policy and bureaucratic agencies more generally.

Debate: Involuntary treatment - not whether, but when and what else is needed.

Involuntary treatment is a complex dialectic balancing self-autonomy and the individual's right to consent to treatment with society's duty to protect those suffering from severe mental illness who are at risk of causing harm to themselves or others. When necessary, involuntary treatment should provide evidence-based and medically justified care, with sufficient oversight and due process to protect the rights of patients. Clinically, the issue is not whether involuntary treatment should ever be used, but rather what other services are needed to enhance the quality of care within comprehensive community systems of care, thus limiting or preventing the need for involuntary interventions while also improving the outcomes of individuals affected by severe mental illness.

Health Risks of Unaccompanied Immigrant Children in Federal Custody and in US Communities.

Unaccompanied immigrant children continue to arrive at the US-Mexico border and are at high risk for ongoing abuse, neglect, and poor mental and physical health. We are medical and legal experts in the fields of immigrant and refugee health, child abuse, and the legal rights of international refugee and migrant children. We provide an overview of US federal agencies with custody of unaccompanied immigrant children, a summary of medical care provided while in custody, and recent findings from the independent Juvenile Care Monitor Report mandating new custodial conditions for immigrant children while in federal custody. We provide recommendations to improve the health and well-being of unaccompanied immigrant children while in custody and once released to US sponsors. (Am J Public Health. 2024;114(3):340-346. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2023.307570).

Understanding the Legal Rights and Mental Health Needs of Unaccompanied Immigrant Children in US Government Custody and Beyond.

This article addresses the mental health rights of unaccompanied children, the ways in which the US immigration system does not sufficiently support children's mental health, and how clinicians can play a role in meeting immigrant children's mental health needs.

Global Health Impact: Human rights, access to medicines, and measurement.

Should people have a legal human right to health? And, if so, what exactly does protecting this right require? This essay defends some answers to these questions recently articulated in Global Health Impact. It explains how these answers depend on a particular way of thinking about health and the minimally good life, how quality of life matters at and over time, what various agents should do to help people who are unable to live well enough, and many other things. Moreover, it suggests some ways of improving common metrics for measuring and advancing our collective global health impact.

From moral rights to legal rights? Lessons from healthcare contexts.

Many believe the existence of a moral right to some good should lead to recognition of a corresponding legal right to that good. If, for instance, there is a moral right to healthcare, it is natural to believe countries should recognize a legal right to healthcare. This article demonstrates that justifying legal rights to healthcare is more difficult than many assume. The existence of a moral right is insufficient to justify recognition of a corresponding justiciable constitutional right. Further conditions on when it is appropriate to recognize constitutional rights are rarely satisfied in the healthcare case. And focusing on aspirational or statutory rights presents costs for those seeking to justify legal rights on the basis of corresponding moral ones while maintaining empirical challenges for justifying constitutional rights. This suggests movement from a moral right to a corresponding legal one is far from straightforward and justifies examining alternative means of realizing moral socio-economic rights such as the proposed moral right to healthcare.

Stopping the Vicious Cycle: Equitable Enforcement Strategies to Achieve Safe, Stable, and Accessible Housing for People with Disabilities.

Policy Points People with disabilities experience a vicious cycle of poverty, poor health, and marginalization partly because of the inequitable implementation and enforcement of laws, including underenforcement of civil rights and housing laws and overenforcement of punitive nuisance and criminal laws. Inequitable enforcement reflects policy choices that prioritize powerful entities (e.g., landlords, developers) to the detriment of people who experience intersectional structural discrimination based on, for example, race, disability, and income. Equitable enforcement, a process of ensuring compliance with the law while considering and minimizing harms to marginalized people, can promote health and disability justice by increasing access to safe, stable, and accessible housing.