Requiring Human Papilloma Virus Vaccination for School Entry

Over 40,000 Americans are diagnosed as having HPV-associated cancer each year, including oropharyngeal cancer for men and cervical cancer for women. These diseases cause significant morbidity and mortality and are largely preventable if people are vaccinated against HPV before they are exposed to the virus. Unfortunately, despite strong evidence of safety and effectiveness of the HPV vaccine, vaccination rates have been disappointingly low – much lower than for the varicella, measles, mumps, rubella, and hepatitis B. The disparity in vaccination rates stem mainly from the fact that HPV vaccination is not universally required for school entry, while the other childhood vaccines are required. In this Viewpoint, we argue that now is the time to mandate HPV vaccination for school entry, and we provide several reasons to support our call to action. First, HPV vaccination is in children’s best interests. Second, while parents should be afforded considerable autonomy in raising their children, law and ethics do not support parents making health-related decisions that are contrary to their child’s best interests. Third, HPV vaccination is a form of social solidarity, and ought to protect ourselves and our neighbors from preventable disease and death. Finally, mandating vaccination will bring greater health equity, since racial minorities and those without health insurance suffer disproportionately from cervical cancer and other HPV-associated diseases. We believe the time for action is long overdue and call on state legislatures to enact HPV vaccination mandates linked to school entry, like with other childhood vaccines

Constitutional Injury and Tangibility

The Supreme Court, in the 2016 case Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins, announced a framework for determining whether a plaintiff had alleged an injury that would permit entry into federal court. The Court indicated that a plaintiff, in order to have constitutional standing, needed to suffer harm that was “concrete” or “real.” In explaining how courts could ascertain whether an alleged harm was concrete, the Court created a category of “intangible” harm subject to a distinctive, and arguably more demanding, concreteness inquiry than “tangible” harm, a category that seemingly includes only physical or economic harm. In particular, Spokeo directed courts to inquire into whether an intangible harm bears a sufficiently close relationship to a historically recognized cause of action and into whether such a harm has been elevated by congressional action to the level of cognizability. Since Spokeo, federal courts have wrestled with how to operationalize the Supreme Court’s statements on intangible harm and standing. Beneath the growing body of doctrine lie fundamental questions about which values are at stake in categorizing harm into tangible and intangible varieties; whether the advancement of these values is justified; and whether, if so, this advancement is best accomplished through the conceptual tools that federal courts have applied to the task. This Article investigates and challenges the principles underlying the categorizations of harm outlined in Spokeo, particularly the distinction between tangible and intangible harm. This Article argues that this distinction, and the Spokeo Court’s emphasis on the “concreteness” of harm more broadly, reflect an effort to identify a set of uncontroversially pressing human interests that would justify access to judicial proceedings. These interests are often conceptualized in terms of those commensurable with money, quantifiable, or susceptible to evidentiary proof. Yet this approach invites courts to make contestable normative judgments about essential human interests in a way that risks undermining judicial legitimacy, and it obscures the internal complexity and contextual specificity of physical and economic harm. For example, economic loss, as well as pain and suffering resulting from physical harm, are treated as intangible in certain legal contexts, and the damage resulting from economic and physical harm cannot always be readily proven or valued at a given point in time. The Supreme Court’s emphasis on concreteness and its invocation of tangibility, this Article contends, are not needed in order to achieve a nuanced balance between competing features of standing doctrine: concerns about the separation of powers and the efficient administration of justice, on the one hand, and concerns about access to the federal courts and judicial legitimacy, on the other. Rather, courts should eschew concreteness as a factor in the standing inquiry independently of whether harm is adequately particularized. Moreover, particularity can fruitfully be understood, in statutory cases, in terms of whether the legal provision under which a plaintiff is suing defines the scope of potential plaintiffs with sufficient specificity

Psychological Harm and Constitutional Standing

When do psychological or emotional harms count as “injury-in-fact” for the purposes of satisfying Article III standing requirements, and when should they? Courts have wrestled with whether to grant standing, for example, to family members of a man killed by the police who argued that as relatives of the deceased, they had suffered emotional pain; members of an animal-welfare organization who claimed they had undergone “sleeplessness, depression, and anger” when they were unable to visit an elephant at the zoo; and members of a Catholic organization who challenged a city resolution criticizing the Catholic Church’s stance on adoption by same-sex couples and contended that they had standing because they had experienced “spiritual or psychological harm.” Some have expressed the concern that recognizing psychological harm would sanction an unlimited expansion of constitutional standing. At the same time, established Article III injuries such as aesthetic and “spiritual” harm seem to contain psychological components. The legal standards for accepting psychological or emotional harm as injury-in-fact remain murky, even as the question of which kinds of harm plaintiffs must allege in order to enter federal court has become increasingly important. This article proposes and applies a framework by which courts can explicitly accept psychological harm as injury-in-fact while distinguishing in a principled way between cognizable and non-cognizable psychological harms. In doing so, this article and the accompanying appendix offer a detailed analysis of the current treatment of psychological harm in constitutional standing doctrine across geographical and temporal boundaries. This article’s approach enables the federal courts to acknowledge more fully citizens’ genuine experiences of harm without abandoning the restrictions on jurisdiction that Article III standing doctrine reflects

The Legacy Of The Universal Declaration Of Human Rights

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights embodies three essential features: (1) it articulated shared, universal values; (2) it identified and strengthened the significance of the individual as a subject of international law, and (3) it declared and emphasized the responsibilities of states to- wards individuals

Panel On The Responses To The Recent Terrorist Attacks On The U.S.

The war on terrorism has a fundamental flaw, which puts its success directly at risk

International Human Rights Law in United States Courts: A Comparative Perspective

This article will catalogue the various contexts in which United States courts have agreed or refused to follow international human rights law, treating separately the larger number of cases concerning customary norms, the relatively small group of cases relating to human rights treaties, and the cases in which international norms are referenced without regard to their status as binding law. In each of these sections we will analyze areas of confusion, disagreement, or under-development in international legal doctrine that impede the productive use of human rights norms by domestic courts. We will also compare the approaches of United States courts with the attitudes taken by courts in other democracies that share a common English legal heritage. The experience of Canada and the United Kingdom indicates that greater acceptance of international human rights standards by the political branches of government, as manifested both by ratification of human rights treaties and by the adjudication of individual complaints by treaty implementation bodies, does not necessarily translate into greater and more principled acceptance of international human rights norms by domestic courts. Finally, we will confront directly the underlying factor debilitating the judicial use of international human rights law - namely, the countermajoritarian issue

Constitutional Injury and Tangibility

The Supreme Court, in the 2016 case Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins, announced a framework for determining whether a plaintiff had alleged an injury that would permit entry into federal court. The Court indicated that a plaintiff, in order to have constitutional standing, needed to suffer harm that was “concrete” or “real.” In explaining how courts could ascertain whether an alleged harm was concrete, the Court created a category of “intangible” harm subject to a distinctive, and arguably more demanding, concreteness inquiry than “tangible” harm, a category that seemingly includes only physical or economic harm. In particular, Spokeo directed courts to inquire into whether an intangible harm bears a sufficiently close relationship to a historically recognized cause of action and into whether such a harm has been elevated by congressional action to the level of cognizability. Since Spokeo, federal courts have wrestled with how to operationalize the Supreme Court’s statements on intangible harm and standing. Beneath the growing body of doctrine lie fundamental questions about which values are at stake in categorizing harm into tangible and intangible varieties; whether the advancement of these values is justified; and whether, if so, this advancement is best accomplished through the conceptual tools that federal courts have applied to the task. This Article investigates and challenges the principles underlying the categorizations of harm outlined in Spokeo, particularly the distinction between tangible and intangible harm. This Article argues that this distinction, and the Spokeo Court’s emphasis on the “concreteness” of harm more broadly, reflect an effort to identify a set of uncontroversially pressing human interests that would justify access to judicial proceedings. These interests are often conceptualized in terms of those commensurable with money, quantifiable, or susceptible to evidentiary proof. Yet this approach invites courts to make contestable normative judgments about essential human interests in a way that risks undermining judicial legitimacy, and it obscures the internal complexity and contextual specificity of physical and economic harm. For example, economic loss, as well as pain and suffering resulting from physical harm, are treated as intangible in certain legal contexts, and the damage resulting from economic and physical harm cannot always be readily proven or valued at a given point in time. The Supreme Court’s emphasis on concreteness and its invocation of tangibility, this Article contends, are not needed in order to achieve a nuanced balance between competing features of standing doctrine: concerns about the separation of powers and the efficient administration of justice, on the one hand, and concerns about access to the federal courts and judicial legitimacy, on the other. Rather, courts should eschew concreteness as a factor in the standing inquiry independently of whether harm is adequately particularized. Moreover, particularity can fruitfully be understood, in statutory cases, in terms of whether the legal provision under which a plaintiff is suing defines the scope of potential plaintiffs with sufficient specificity