For many years, some groups have claimed that the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution stands as an obstacle to most gun control laws. Lawrence E. Rosenthal and Adam Winkler debunk this myth with careful legal analysis of recent court decisions, including District of Columbia v. Heller. This selection from Reducing Gun Violence in America tackles the most fundamental question at hand: How do we reduce gun violence while upholding our constitutional right to bear arms...

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act signed by President Obama in March 2010 is a landmark in U.S. social legislation, and the Supreme Court's recent decision upholding the Act has ensured that it will remain the law of the land. The new law extends health insurance to nearly all Americans, fulfilling a century-long quest and bringing the United States to parity with other industrial nations. Affordable Care aims to control rapidly rising health care costs and promises to make th...

Why medicine adopts ineffective or harmful medical practices only to abandon them—sometimes too late.Medications such as Vioxx and procedures such as vertebroplasty for back pain are among the medical "advances" that turned out to be dangerous or useless. What Dr. Vinayak K. Prasad and Dr. Adam S. Cifu call medical reversal happens when doctors start using a medication, procedure, or diagnostic tool without a robust evidence base—and then stop using it when it is f...

An intimate portrait of the renowned international humanitarian organization.Winner of the PROSE Award for Excellence, Sociology and Social Work of the Association of American PublishersThis study of Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders (MSF) casts new light on the organization’s founding principles, distinctive culture, and inner struggles to realize more fully its “without borders” transnational vision.Pioneering medical sociologist ...

Outstanding Academic Title, Choice MagazineThe staggering toll of gun violence—which claims 31,000 U.S. lives each year—is an urgent public health issue that demands an effective evidence-based policy response.The Johns Hopkins University convened more than 20 of the world's leading experts on gun violence and policy to summarize relevant research and recommend policies that are both constitutional and have broad public support. Collected for the first time in one ...

The international community has made great progress in improving global health. But staggering health inequalities between rich and poor still remain, raising fundamental questions of social justice. In a book that systematically defines the burgeoning field of global health law, Lawrence Gostin drives home the need for effective global governance for health and offers a blueprint for reform, based on the principle that the opportunity to live a healthy life is a basic human right....

Story lines from The Wire challenge public perceptions about the deadly, real-world connections between drugs, crime, and poverty.Did Omar Little die of lead poisoning? Would a decriminalization strategy like the one in Hamsterdam end the War on Drugs? What will it take to save neglected kids like Wallace and Dukie? Tapping into 'The Wire' uses the acclaimed television series as a road map for exploring connections between inner-city poverty and d...

"A major contribution not just to tobacco control research but also to research on global governance and public health . . . thorough [and] compelling." —Frank J. Chaloupka IV, Institute for Health Research and Policy, University of Illinois–ChicagoAs the era of globalization progressed, the tobacco industry capitalized on its elements—including trade liberalization, foreign direct investment, and global communications—to expand into countries where effective tobac...

The U.S. healthcare system is in critical condition--but this should come as a surprise to no one. Yet until now the solutions proposed have been unworkable, pie-in-the-sky plans that have had little chance of becoming law and even less of succeeding. In Code Red, David Dranove, one of the nation's leading experts on the economics of healthcare, proposes a set of feasible solutions that address access, efficiency, and quality.Dranove offers pragmatic remedies, some of them...

The Politics of Precaution examines the politics of consumer and environmental risk regulation in the United States and Europe over the last five decades, explaining why America and Europe have often regulated a wide range of similar risks differently. It finds that between 1960 and 1990, American health, safety, and environmental regulations were more stringent, risk averse, comprehensive, and innovative than those adopted in Europe. But since around 1990, the book shows, global ...

Global Health Disputes and Disparities explores inequalities in health around the world, looking particularly at the opportunity for, and limitations of, international law to promote population health by examining its intersection with human rights, trade, and epidemiology, and the controversial issues of legal process, religion, access to care, and the social context of illness.Using a theoretical framework rooted in international law, this volume draws on a wide range of...

Since the introduction of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, individuals and organizations have increasingly turned to the courts to try to bring about policy change in areas such as health care. Health Care and the Charter explores the systematic use of Charter litigation in the area of health care and the ultimate policy impact of the resulting judicial decisions. Christopher P. Manfredi and Antonia Maioni examine three of the most controversial Suprem...