Health Law Scholarship Retreat showcased research in progress

On July 27, Loyola’s Beazley Institute for Health Law and Policy hosted colleagues from the Chicagoland area for our biannual Health Law Scholarship Retreat. This half-day retreat is an opportunity for scholars from Loyola, DePaul, Northwestern, Chicago-Kent, and UIC to present their works in progress and receive constructive feedback.  

This event showcased our colleagues’ impressive research on a wide variety of topics. Professor Kate Mitchell presented “Upstreaming for Lawyers,” which traces the development of the “upstream” approach to high-level problem solving from the world of public health to the world of law and offers best practices for attorneys doing upstream work. Professor Cynthia Ho presented “Addressing the Public Health Harms of Trade Secrecy,” an article that brings together scholarly conversations about the ways in which trade secret protections can impede the development of public health efforts, ranging from vaccine development and distribution to environmental protections. 

Three faculty members from DePaul also showcased their current research. Professor Max Helveston explored the impact of state anti-price gouging laws in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in “Regulating Economic Opportunism.” Professor Julie Campbell, who received her LLM in Health Law from Loyola, presented “The Primary Care Provider: A Reliable Proxy for Patient End-of-Life Wishes,” arguing that a revision of state surrogacy laws is needed to protect unrepresented patients. And in “Testing the Effects of Price Transparency and No-Debt-Collection Policies on Healthcare Consumption and Physician Trust: A Randomized Vignette Experiment,” Professor Wendy Epstein described the results of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded study aimed at understanding how to increase consumer uptake of health insurance.