The Website Accommodations Test: Applying the Americans with Disabilities Act to Websites

In 2017, 814 lawsuits were filed alleging discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) due to website inaccessibility, up from 262 in the previous year. Beginning in July 2010, the federal Department of Justice (DOJ) considered issuing regulations under ADA Title III related to website accessibility. However, no changes have been made to date, leaving courts split over whether websites constitute places of public accommodation via the ADA. Dispositive to some jurisdictions’ holdings is whether a website has a nexus to a physical place, which may lend toward viewing the site as a public accommodation. Other jurisdictions provide that all websites are public accommodations under the ADA. The current approaches conflict with the Congressional intent of the ADA and provide little guidance to website owners. Thus, neither approach is sufficient for the uniform application of ADA protections. Absent Congressional action, courts should utilize a new “website accommodations test” (WAT) in applying the ADA to websites

Constitutional Cohesion and the Right to Public Health

Despite years of significant legal improvements stemming from a renaissance in public health law, Americans still face major challenges and barriers in assuring their communal health. Reversals of legal reforms coupled with maligned policies and chronic underfunding contribute to diminished public health outcomes. Underlying preventable morbidity and mortality nationally are realities of our existing constitutional infrastructure. In essence, there is no general obligation of government to protect or promote the public’s health. Under principles of “constitutional cohesion,” structural facets and rights-based principles interwoven within the Constitution protect individuals and groups from governmental vices (i.e., oppression, overreaching, tyranny, and malfeasance). Structural impediments and rights infringements provide viable options to challenge governmental efforts inapposite to protecting the public’s health. Through corollary applications framed as auxiliary, creative, and ghost righting, courts are also empowered to recognize core duties or rights that the Constitution may not explicitly denote but assuredly contains, to remedy identifiable vices. Notably, ghost righting charts a course for recognizing a constitutional right to public health that Americans are owed, and government must respect, to assure basic public health needs

Constitutional Cohesion and the Right to Public Health

Despite years of significant legal improvements stemming from a renaissance in public health law, Americans still face major challenges and barriers in assuring their communal health. Reversals of legal reforms coupled with maligned policies and chronic underfunding contribute to diminished public health outcomes. Underlying preventable morbidity and mortality nationally are realities of our existing constitutional infrastructure. In essence, there is no general obligation of government to protect or promote the public’s health. Under principles of “constitutional cohesion,” structural facets and rights-based principles interwoven within the Constitution protect individuals and groups from governmental vices (i.e., oppression, overreaching, tyranny, and malfeasance). Structural impediments and rights infringements provide viable options to challenge governmental efforts inapposite to protecting the public’s health. Through corollary applications framed as auxiliary, creative, and ghost righting, courts are also empowered to recognize core duties or rights that the Constitution may not explicitly denote but assuredly contains, to remedy identifiable vices. Notably, ghost righting charts a course for recognizing a constitutional right to public health that Americans are owed, and government must respect, to assure basic public health needs

The promise of machine learning applications in solid organ transplantation

Abstract Solid-organ transplantation is a life-saving treatment for end-stage organ disease in highly selected patients. Alongside the tremendous progress in the last several decades, new challenges have emerged. The growing disparity between organ demand and supply requires optimal patient/donor selection and matching. Improvements in long-term graft and patient survival require data-driven diagnosis and management of post-transplant complications. The growing abundance of clinical, genetic, radiologic, and metabolic data in transplantation has led to increasing interest in applying machine-learning (ML) tools that can uncover hidden patterns in large datasets. ML algorithms have been applied in predictive modeling of waitlist mortality, donor–recipient matching, survival prediction, post-transplant complications diagnosis, and prediction, aiming to optimize immunosuppression and management. In this review, we provide insight into the various applications of ML in transplant medicine, why these were used to evaluate a specific clinical question, and the potential of ML to transform the care of transplant recipients. 36 articles were selected after a comprehensive search of the following databases: Ovid MEDLINE; Ovid MEDLINE Epub Ahead of Print and In-Process & Other Non-Indexed Citations; Ovid Embase; Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (Ovid); and Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (Ovid). In summary, these studies showed that ML techniques hold great potential to improve the outcome of transplant recipients. Future work is required to improve the interpretability of these algorithms, ensure generalizability through larger-scale external validation, and establishment of infrastructure to permit clinical integration