I am currently in the final (I hope) stages of working on a book tentatively called Populations, Population Health, and the Law. The book explores the role of public health in the law and seeks to develop an approach to legal analysis that I call population-based legal analysis. Because the book applies that approach to many areas of the law, I've had to learn numerous doctrines and areas of the law. Right now, as I'm working on the final chapter, I'm looking at the relationship between public health and international human rights law, a subject that is of course quite central to much of the work that is going on in the law school, but relatively new to me.

Bragdon v. Abbott. About a decade ago, I had the amazing opportunity to work with Ben Klein, a very gifted lawyer at Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD), on a case brought under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) by a woman who was discriminated against by a dentist because she was HIV positive. Lo and behold, the case went to the US Supreme Court and became that Court's first case defining the ADA as well as the Court's first case deciding the rights of people who are HIV-positive. Remarkably, the case raised all of the issues and concerns that I have thought about throughout my career — discrimination, health care access, public health protection and the rights of people with disabilities. Working on the case with Ben was a challenging, stimulating and exciting experience. And, thankfully, we won!

My most recent article is "A New Era of Unapproved Drugs: The Case of Abigail Alliance v. Von Esenbach," in 297 Journal of the American Medical Association 205 (2006), with Peter Jacobson. This article reports on and criticizes a quite-remarkable decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia last June, which found that terminally ill patients had a fundamental constitutional right to use drugs that had completed the first stage of the FDA approval process but had not yet been licensed. While the article was in publication, right before Thanksgiving, the Court of Appeals vacated the decision and ordered a rehearing en banc. Then, a short time later, the FDA proposed new regulations designed to make unapproved drugs more accessible. As you can imagine, my co-author, Professor Peter Jacobson, and I were getting tired of writing last minute revisions! But all of these developments kept the topic interesting and notable. The full Court of Appeals is going to rehear the case shortly; so the case — which goes to the heart of the FDA's authority to regulate drugs for safety and efficacy — remains very much alive.

Also in the past few months, several other articles and chapters that I have written over the past year have been published. "Terri and Katrina: A Population-Based Perspective on the Constitutional Right to Reject Treatment," in 15 Temple Political and Civil Rights Law Review 395 (2006), looks at the so-called right to die and the controversy surrounding the Terri Schaivo case from a public health perspective. "Pharmaceuticals, Public Health and the Law: A Public Health Perspective," is a chapter in a newly published book, The Power of the Pill, edited by Northeastern Philosophy Professor Patricia Illingworth and University of Toronoto Professor Jillian Cohen. In the chapter, I discuss some of the ways in which pharmaceuticals have characteristics of public goods. In the introduction to the 2d edition of Law and Public Health Practice (Richard Goodman, et. al., eds.), I discuss the relationship between law and public health and why the two fields need to be better acquainted.

It is hard to name the best book I've read this past year, but one that I enjoyed immensely was Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. The book is dystopian story that seems to be about the dangers of biotechnology, but is, I think, more generally about the human condition. Of course, that is my broader take on many issues in bioethics. They are not difficult because of the novels of technology, they are difficult because they require us to reconsider enduring dilemmas of the human condition.

Being with my family, but as my children are no longer little, I find I have less time with them. Walking (when there is no ice!), reading fiction and following the Red Sox.

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