Science, Health & Information Clinic

Course Description

The Science, Health, and Information Clinic serves the public interest by fighting for—and winning—more equitable access to scientific, technical, and medical knowledge and to the benefits that flow from that knowledge. In short, we are a health justice and information justice clinic. We seek to democratize and expand access to health care, and we seek to democratize and expand access to information vital to health and human flourishing.

The Science, Health, and Information Clinic strives to address legal needs unmet by public interest legal organizations and other law school clinics. Students, under faculty supervision, provide pro bono legal services to activists and organizers, scientific and medical researchers, patient and consumer groups, nonprofit organizations, and other clients.

The Science, Health, and Information Clinic is directed by Professor Christopher Morten.

Exemplary organizations that Chris and his clinic students have partnered with and represented in the past include Doctors Without Borders and Public Citizen. The clinic currently has attorney-client relationships with Doctors for America, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, PrEP4All, T1International USA, Universities Allied for Essential Medicines, and other nonprofit, advocacy, and activist groups committed to equitable access to health care, to technology, and to the fruits of scientific research.

The Science, Health, and Information Clinic provides students with rich, hands-on lawyering experience representing these clients. The clinic endeavors to nurture ethical, creative, and independent student attorneys prepared to practice in emerging areas of law, science, and technology—areas that are increasingly critical to our economy, our society, and our health.

Student attorneys:

• Own their projects and become their clients’ primary points of contact.
• Work directly with their clients to help them define and achieve their goals.
• Learn to use a wide array of legal tools to meet their clients’ legal needs. These include client counseling; research and advocacy to legislators, policymakers, and the broader public; litigation; amicus briefs; petitions and comments to administrative agencies; licenses and other contracts; and Freedom of Information Act requests.
• Are immersed in the many doctrines of law that shape science, health, and information, including intellectual property law, data privacy law, administrative and regulatory law, health law, and freedom of information law.

The clinic has two and only two prerequisites:

1. Students must be curious about science, technology, information governance, and/or health care in some way.
2. Students must be excited to represent clients who are committed to fighting for the public interest—as defined in diverse ways—in areas of law and policy where corporate and government interests often predominate.

The clinic seeks to expand ideas of what science and technology law is and who counts as science and technology lawyers. To support that mission, no special degrees or work experience are required, and neither is any experience with any particular area of law. There are no pre- or co-requisite courses. (Of course, students with work or educational experience in science, engineering, public health, and health care are welcome to apply.)

All clinic students, regardless of background, are encouraged to draw on their personal experiences with science, technology, and health care.

Students in the clinic are paired with clients and placed on fieldwork projects based on their personal preferences.

Fieldwork

The Science, Health, and Information Clinic’s “fieldwork” is its work for clients, in the real world of law and policy. Fieldwork is student-led, under faculty supervision. Student attorneys in the clinic fully inhabit the role of the lawyer, gaining real-world experience. For example, they:

• Interview clients to understand their values and goals.
• Help clients develop and implement a long-term legal strategy.
• Advise clients on key decisions.
• Organize and lead meetings with clients, policymakers, and civil society coalitions.
• Conduct factual and legal research.
• Write, edit, and file legal and non-legal documents.
• Negotiate.
• Represent clients in court and agency hearings and meetings.

Every semester, the clinic takes on a diverse set of fieldwork projects that offers students broad exposure to different areas of health care, science, technology, law, and policy, even as student attorneys immerse themselves deeply in one or two projects of their own. Students are matched to their fieldwork projects based on their personal interests and career goals.

The clinic is a member of the Free Expression Legal Network (FELN) and part of the informal community of “tech clinics” at law schools throughout the United States and Canada. The clinic draws some of its clients and fieldwork projects from these networks.

Every fieldwork project begins from square one and assumes no specific substantive knowledge beyond 1L courses. Students must lawyer creatively and courageously—there is usually no blueprint, no playbook to follow. This can be challenging as well as liberating. Students quickly mature from novices into experts on fast-moving, timely issues. Students set their individual learning goals at the beginning of each semester and reflect frequently on their progress as they experiment, practice, and grow.

Exemplary fieldwork projects in the clinic's three main areas of focus are outlined below.

Are of Focus #1: Increasing access to medicines, vaccines, diagnostics, and other medical technologies.

In prior years, students have worked with Morten to:

• Collaborate with PrEP4All to advocate that the U.S. government bring a first-of-its-kind patent infringement lawsuit against a brand-name drug company to recoup public investment in HIV research and increase access to HIV care.
• Challenge, on behalf of PrEP4All, a drug company’s efforts to extend its patent monopoly on HIV prevention medication by filing an administrative petition at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
• Work with PrEP4All to publish a practical white paper that explains how federal policymakers could employ a long-standing federal statute—28 U.S.C. § 1498—to use privately held patents on the public’s behalf and thereby lower drug prices.
• Publish a report that analyzes a foundational patent on coronavirus vaccines owned by the U.S. government and advocates assertion of the patent to increase global access to COVID-19 vaccines.
• Help #insulin4all activists at T1International develop and submit formal written comments urging the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to improve training for examiners of pharmaceutical and biotechnology patents, increase information sharing with the Food & Drug Administration (FDA), and expand public participation in the patent process.
• File amicus briefs in the Northern District of Texas, Fifth Circuit, and U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of Doctors for America, in support of the FDA’s approval and regulation of mifepristone, a leading medication abortion drug.
• File an amicus brief on behalf of professors of law, medicine, and public health explaining the central role of U.S. government research, patenting, patent licensing, and public-private partnership in the pharmaceutical technology ecosystem.

Area of Focus #2: Discouraging harmful uses of science and technology, including harmful uses of personal data.

In prior years, students have worked with Morten to:

• Submit a comment to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services identifying a gap in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Privacy Rule that subjects transgender, HIV-positive, and other people to discrimination in health care.
• Analyze “shield laws” that protect the data privacy of people seeking and providing abortion and gender-affirming health care, and, with Doctors for America, publish a guide to protections in New York State.

Are of Focus #3: Expanding open science, data sharing, and public access to valuable scientific, technical, and medical information.

In prior years, students have worked with Morten to:

• Bring and win an Administrative Procedure Act lawsuit on behalf of two medical researchers, Charles Seife and Peter Lurie, against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health, and FDA, to vindicate the public’s right to obtain important scientific data via the ClinicalTrials.gov website.
• Use the Freedom of Information Act to investigate the FDA’s and National Institutes of Health’s plans to enforce a federal scientific data-sharing statute, on behalf of Universities Allied for Essential Medicines.
• Counsel Doctors Without Borders on legislative and regulatory advocacy to provide public access to information on the true costs of medical research.
• Petition the FDA to improve clinical trial transparency through enforcement of the Food and Drug Administration Amendments Act (FDAAA), on behalf of Universities Allied for Essential Medicines, and win a significant transparency victory.
• Challenge secrecy in a patent litigation in the District of Delaware, prompting the district judge to require a major pharmaceutical company to unseal hundreds of pages of previously secret evidence of its business practices.
• Litigate, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a motion to unseal secret documents in a patent infringement dispute in federal district court, to safeguard the public’s right to access information in important technology cases.

Seminar

Clinic students attend seminars once or twice a week, which bridge theory and practice. Seminars prepare students for their fieldwork and for legal work after graduation. They focus on how to practice law as it exists today as well as how to reshape and use law to make society healthier, fairer, and more just.

The seminars include lectures on substantive law topics (often to provide a foundation for fieldwork); student-led presentations on emerging problems in science, technology, and information; and simulations and problem-solving workshops.

Many seminars feature informal case rounds where student attorneys share triumphs and challenges in their fieldwork projects and brainstorm through questions as a group. Other seminars focus on lawyers’ rules of professional responsibility and explore deeper ethical questions—for example, what exactly is the public interest, and who speaks on its behalf? 

Seminars also invite guest lecturers, who may be drawn from the worlds of journalism, activism, public health, scientific research, government, and public interest legal organizations.

Learning Outcomes

At the end of the course, students will have acquired understanding of and/or facility in

• doctrinal analysis, including close reading of cases and precedents, and application to facts
• statutory and regulatory analysis, including close reading of statutes and regulations, and application to facts
• ethical and professional issues
• the influences of political institutions in law
• various lawyering skills, for example, oral advocacy, legal writing and drafting, legal research, negotiation, and client communication
• cross-cultural competence
• the ability to recognize and address bias and racism in legal system

Application Procedure

Students interested in applying for the clinic should submit the standard application, resume, and transcript online through CAMS. The clinic director may conduct interviews of some applicants. If you have specific questions about the clinic, please contact Chris Morten. If you have questions about the application procedure, please contact Susan Hodges.

* 7 credits include 4 clinical credits and 3 academic seminar credits each semester.
** All students are welcome and encouraged to apply. The clinic will teach all relevant substantive law students need to know.
*** A course or two in any of the following may prove useful: health law, administrative law, privacy law, patent law, trade secrecy law, First Amendment law, media law.