New Course to Examine Links between Health, Law, and Society

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New Course to Examine Links between Health, Law, and Society

 

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New York, Sept. 7, 2011—As both healthcare reform legislation and litigation remain key issues of the national legal agenda, Columbia Law School will offer a new course this fall that examines the complex intersection of health, law, and policy and the effect of these connections on Americans. Abbe R. Gluck, Associate Professor of Law and the Milton Handler Fellow and Elizabeth S. Scott, theHarold R. Medina Professor of Law, will co-teach the course.
 
The Health Law and Society colloquium adds to the Law School’s fast-growing 
health-law curriculum, which ranges from a seminar in Current Issues in Health Law, to courses in Genetics and the Law, Public Health Law, and the Law and Business of Health Care.
 
According to Gluck, students enrolled in the Health Law colloquium will engage with legal, public health, and other health-related academics and policy experts who will present scholarship related to the new health reform legislation, the litigation challenging it, and reform work left undone.
 
“We have a phenomenal group of experts from the Columbia University and across the country who each month will talk about different aspects of health reform legislation and litigation,” said Gluck.Topics include:
 
  • Constitutional challenges to health reform legislation, led by Mark Hall, Wake Forest University School of Law professor, and one of the nation’s leading experts on health care and bioethics;
  • Health insurance exchanges, the new one-stop shopping centers for health insurance purchase that were enacted as part of the 2010 law, led by Timothy Jost, a law professor at Washington and Lee University School of Law and a groundbreaking scholar in the health-law field;
  • Accountable care organizations, a key aspect of the health reform legislation’s service delivery reforms, led by Professor Thomas Greaney of the Saint Louis University School of Law, who also is a leading casebook author, and;
  • The challenges facing Medicare, led by Columbia University’s Michael S. Sparer, Professor and Department Chair of Health Policy and Management at the Mailman School of Public Health.
 
Most of the colloquium’s students will come from the Law School, but a third will be drawn from other Columbia schools, including the Mailman School of Public Health and the Columbia University Medical Center. Throughout the course, students will be introduced both to the practice of scholarly critique and discussion and also to fundamental topics in health law and reform.
 
Professor Scott believes “this new chapter in the history of the Health Law Colloquium will be a great addition to the curriculum”and that students will benefit from Gluck’s “broad expertise in health law and policy.” 
 
The Law School has, for a number of years, hosted a monthly interdisciplinary workshop for students and faculty from across Columbia University interested in health-related subjects. However, this year, for the first time, a classroom component has been added to complement the monthly workshops, with students receiving credit for the course. The colloquium builds on the successes of other similar colloquium-related courses, including the Tax Policy Colloquium and the Advanced Legislation Colloquium, which Professor Gluck ran last year.
 
“The public attention to the health care debate has finally shined a light on how important these issues are,” said Gluck. “That should make this a particularly exciting time for everyone who participates in this colloquium.”
 
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