BLS Library Blog

With the debate over the repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act raging, you might be interested in researching the act.  The library has 36 titles that are tagged with the subject, United States and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  Listed below are a few of those titles.

Purva H. Rawal, The Affordable Care Act: Examining the Facts (2016).

This is the first reference book to provide a detailed assessment of the Affordable Care Act, explaining the realities and myths surrounding one of the most divisive political struggles in recent U.S. history.  This is an e-book.  If you are off campus, you will need to implement the proxy instructions in a web browser.

Steven Brill, America’s bitter pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix our Broken Healthcare System (2015).

This book details how the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, was written, how it is being implemented, and, most important, how it is changing—and failing to change—the rampant abuses in the healthcare industry. It’s a fly-on-the-wall account of the titanic fight to pass a 961-page law aimed at fixing America’s largest, most dysfunctional industry.

Josh Blackman, Unraveled: Obamacare, Religious Liberty, and Executive Power (2016).

Six years after its enactment, this book provides the definitive account of the battle to stop Obamacare from being ‘woven into the fabric of America’. Unraveled is essential reading to understand the future of the Affordable Care Act in America’s gridlocked government in 2016, and beyond. This is an e-book.  If you are off campus, you will need to implement the proxy instructions in a web browser.

Josh Blackman, Unprecedented: The Constitutional Challenge to Obamacare (2013).

This inside story of the legal challenge to Obamacare from a conservative constitutional lawyer involved in the movement is a mixture of legal, political, and media intrigue capped by a truly consequential Supreme Court decision.

Discover the poisons that brought New York City to its knees in “The poisoner’s handbook : murder and the birth of forensic medicine in Jazz Age” by Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer, Deborah Blum.

The heroes of her book are Charles Norris, New York City’s first Medicinal Examiner, and Alexander Gettler, his able assistant and expert toxicologists. From the vantage of the New York City Medical Examiner’s Laboratory, it also becomes clear that murderers are not the only toxic threat–modern life has created a poisonous playground, and danger lurks around every corner.

“The Poisoner’s Handbook” is structured like a collection of linked short stories. Each chapter centers on a mysterious death by poison that Norris and Gettler investigate. Blum also focuses on the real villains – the poisons – and their deadly maneuverings through the body.

The chapters detail Norris’ death investigations and are classified according to the chemical compound detected in corpses by Gettler. Described are a suite of deadly substances including chloroform; bad booze because of Prohibition; industrial toxins such as radium; and carbon monoxide from illumination gas and automobile exhausts. In each chapter It is a contest between murder suspects and Gettler’s laboratory methods, which improved markedly during the decade.

Each case presents a deadly new puzzle and the need to create revolutionary experiments to tease out the wiliest chemical compounds from human tissue and perform trailblazing chemical detective work. Blum sets forth the facts of such cases, attentive to chemical clues the suspect overlooked but Gettler didn’t. Formative figures in forensics, Norris and Gettler become fascinating crusaders in Blum’s fine depiction of their work in the law-flouting atmosphere of Prohibition-era New York.

The fruits of their labors helped advance government policy and the science of forensics, and have saved countless lives from exposure to previously hard-to-detect toxic substances like thallium and to the then unknown deadly effects of radium, once a crucial ingredient in a popular health tonic called “Radithor: Certified Radioactive Water.”

According to the New York Times, “there is no music in Blum’s “Jazz Age,” a descriptor that feels tacked on to the subtitle by the marketing department, but there are “jazz-flavored cocktails” aplenty. After all, it’s Prohibition, and the government’s efforts to make alcohol less desirable by adding poisons to it constitute one of her most alarming and worthy plots. In this woozy speakeasy atmosphere, unforgettable stories abound. Take “Mike the Durable,” who initially survives even after his killers try numerous ways to do him in. There is also the lovers Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray, who inspired James M. Cain’s novels “The Postman Always Rings Twice” and “Double Indemnity.” Ultimately, “The Poisoner’s Handbook” fascinates.”

This month, the American Bar Association Law Student Division has launched a mental health initiative to help law students battling depression, anxiety and substance abuse. The culmination of the project is National Mental Health Day on March 27. According to the organization’s web site, it will provide participating law schools with a mental health toolkit for student bar organizations and law deans to make available to students. Included in the toolkit is The Hidden Sources of Law School Stress a pamphlet written by Lawrence Krieger, a clinical professor at Florida State University College of Law.

One objective of the initiative is to help de-stigmatize problems with depression and anxiety among students. Often students avoid seeking help because they are concerned that they may have to disclose their problems in order to sit for the bar exam in their jurisdiction. On February 11, 2008 the ABA House of Delegates adopted as ABA policy a new Model Rule on Conditional Admission to Practice Law for bar applicants who have substance abuse or mental health conditions. Many jurisdictions may deem applicants unfit to practice for those reasons. The model rule, which is only advisory, would allow admission authorities to monitor such individuals for a period of time to insure that recovery is successful. It also provides for confidentiality so that those using its provisions will feel free to seek treatment without suffering stigma or denial of admission.

Locally, the New York City Bar Lawyer Assistance Program (NYC LAP) has a free, confidential service, available to attorneys, judges, law students and their family members, in New York City, who are struggling with alcohol or drug abuse, depression, anxiety, stress, as well as other addictions and mental health issues.

Source: National Law Journal, Leigh Jones, ABA Law Student Group Tackles Depression, March 12, 2008