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Washington and Lee Law Review - Vol. 76

Roundtable

by Shaakirrah R. Sanders

I join Carliss Chatman’s call to fully consider the equal protection implications of the conception theory and raise an additional right to which a fetus may be entitled as a matter of equal protection: health care, which implicates state laws that provide civil and criminal exemptions to parents who choose religious healing instead of medical care for their children and minor dependents. The evidence of harm to children from religious healing is well documented. Yet, currently, approximately forty-three U.S. states and the District of Columbia have some type of exemption to protect religious healing parents in civil and criminal cases.

Religious healing is the belief that “prayer” or “spiritual means” rather than modern medicine can cure individuals. Criminal exemptions apply to prosecutions for murder and homicides, child abuse, child endangerment, child neglect, contributing to neglect or deprivation, criminal injury, cruelty, delinquency, failure to provide medical and surgical attention, failure to report suspected child neglect or abuse, manslaughter, nonsupport, and omission to provide for a child. Civil exemptions apply to claims for child abuse, child neglect, contributing to neglect, dependency proceedings, failure to provide medical care or adequate treatment, failure to report, maltreatment, negligence, nonsupport, and temporary or permanent termination proceedings.

Response

by Allison Weiss

In his note, Ryan Johnson drills down on the various ways that courts within the Second Circuit are approaching the viability of § 1983 lawsuits by incarcerated individuals against supervisors within correctional facilities. But how important is supervisory liability in the first place? Qualified immunity allows courts, as Mr. Johnson puts it, to “cop-out” from engaging in difficult constitutional inquiries and instead dispose of the case by invoking the magical words: “the law is unclear.” Over the past thirty-five years, the Supreme Court has decided many qualified immunity cases, never seriously signaling a desire to reconsider its qualified immunity precedent. However, with the Supreme Court’s current trend of overruling its prior decisions, we can hope that the Court’s flawed qualified immunity jurisprudence is next on the chopping block.

This comment is a response to Ryan E. Johnson, Note, Supervisors Without Supervision: Colon, McKenna, and the Confusing State of Supervisory Liability in the Second Circuit77 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 457 (2020), which received the 2019 Washington and Lee Law Council Law Review Award.

Development

by Paul J. Larkin Jr.

State lawmakers should allow those graduates to receive a provisional license so that they can provide emergency medical care under the supervision of a licensed physician to help treat the ever-increasing number of COVID-19 patients we will see throughout the near future, or those patients who suffer from more common illness and injuries. Each level of government has its own peculiar responsibilities to address the COVID-19 pandemic. The states are responsible for licensing physicians who can treat the affected people. Each year, a large number of American and foreign medical school graduates do not find a residency position in the United States. Medical school graduates who have passed the qualifying examination have acquired a considerable amount of education and training during their medical studies, far more than physician assistants, nurses, military corpsmen and medics, and civilian paramedics or emergency medical technicians. They comprise a pool of talent that could be immensely useful in ameliorating the shortage of physician care throughout the country during the pandemic.

Note

by Luke Charette

This Note explores the reasoning and factors used by each of the federal circuits in deciding whether or not to uphold attorney-client privilege between the government and the lawyers representing it. After considering those factors, this Note argues that there should be a categorical rule that neither a state nor the federal government may invoke the attorney-client privilege in response to a criminal grand jury subpoena. To justify this conclusion, this Note outlines how current government attorney-client privilege case law, as well as the policy underpinnings of the privilege itself, dictate that a categorical rule is appropriate.

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