EXP: Health Law in Practice (Dobkin)
Additional Information
Experiential CourseYes
Skills Training
Oral Presentations
Expository Writing
Other Professional Skills: Students will receive a series of exercises during the course of the semester, which will direct them to address various scenarios that confront counsel for a network of hospitals and physicians. They will be expected to turn in these exercises, some of which will be graded, and to share their perspectives with the class. Discussion of the readings, and the assignments, is an important aspect of the seminar.
Grading
20% Participation,
80% Other (A series of written classroom assignments will be submitted, evaluated and graded. The last exercise will be more comprehensive but will be assigned and completed prior to the formal exam period. There will not be a final exam. )
No
Classroom discussion is an integral part of the seminar, and students should be prepared to participate actively.
Class meets in person.
Course Continuity
Students are encouraged to stay home if you are ill or experience flu-like symptoms. If you miss a class for any reason, it is still your responsibility to make up the work missed.
I offer the following to students who miss class due to illness:
- Class sessions are regularly recorded. If you are absent due to illness or some other unavoidable circumstance, email Dean Sara Pyle, Associate Dean of Students. Upon receipt of her authorization, I will email instructions to you for accessing the recording for the class session(s) you missed.
Meeting Times/Location
T 4:30PM - 6:20PM
Tanenbaum Hall 253
Category
Upper-Level
Credits
2.0
Prof. Lee Dobkin
Health Law Practice from the Inside
Health care is one of the most regulated industries in the United States, and intensely personal for its citizens, the vast majority of whom will encounter it directly or indirectly each year. Legal practitioners must synthesize complicated and occasionally conflicting authority, and apply it to challenging problems, often with limited time to fact gather and provide guidance. This course plans to examine topics including the physician/patient relationship, informed consent, patient privacy and confidentiality, medical malpractice and fraud and abuse, through the prism of those tasked with providing counsel to hospitals and physicians. While we will review relevant authority, our focus will be on how counsel should apply those rules, often imprecisely, to a series of case-based problems drawn from practice in this arena. An in-house perspective will be a fundamental characteristic of the class. A distinctive feature of such lawyering is the ability to communicate with, and guide, non-lawyers in a manner designed to demystify and uncomplicate the relevant law, however opaque it may be. For such internal clients, traditional legal memoranda, assessing the various arguments on one hand and then the other, are often of only limited utility. (It is a sphere in which the perfect often can be the enemy of the good). Whether one aspires eventually to practice in-house, or to be retained as outside counsel by such lawyers, this is a “language” worth studying.
The assessment for this course will be a combination of written exercises assigned in class, which will cumulatively count for 80 percent of the grade, and classroom participation, which will count for 20 percent. Weekly attendance is mandatory, and students should alert me if circumstances are going to prevent them from attending.
Health Law Learning outcomes: Demonstrate a core understanding of health law and policy; Perform legal analysis in the context of health law and policy; Communicate effectively on topics related to health law and policy; Demonstrate an understanding of the interconnection among health law and policy and issues of access to services, public and private financing of health industries, and the political and economic issues surrounding issues of health law and health services.