Licensing Laws Research Articles

Ensuring America's Health: The Public Creation of the Corporate Health Care SystemRemaking the American Patient: How Madison Avenue and Modern Medicine Turned Patients into Consumers

Ensuring America's Health: The Public Creation of the Corporate Health Care SystemRemaking the American Patient: How Madison Avenue and Modern Medicine Turned Patients into Consumers

Modern Investment Legislation in Egypt

The main purpose of the article is to determine and analyze the essence and role of contemporary investment legislation in Egypt within the process of active “authoritarian modernisation”. The latter has been evolving in the Egyptian political and economic institutional structure in the latter half of 2010s, after the failure of the previous reforms and their driving political forces connected to and supporting the “Arab spring” of 2011-2013. The attention is concentrated on the recent legislative regulating instruments, designed to stimulate the investment activities of both local and foreign businesses, especially with the aim to direct their financial, managerial, technological and other resources, starting with the hard currency inflows, to the execution of new projects selected by the state due to their strategic importance for modern Egyptian economy. Most importance in this context is the analysis of the Investment Law No. 72 of 2017 and the Law No. 72 of 2017 Promulgating the Investment Law. The study reveals that those documents, less than a year after their coming into force, have already proved ample potential to accelerate economic development of the Arab country under review, i.e. serving as a means to increase the attraction of incoming foreign direct investments (FDI). The new laws should compliment other economic reforms, which have been recently implemented, including: 1) the shift from the previous sales tax regime to a comprehensive value added tax (VAT) system; 2) the liberalisation of the foreign exchange system; 3) the adoption of a flexible exchange rate regime; and 4) the gradual reduction of energy subsidies. The author admits that it is rather difficult to separate the effects of each one of the mentioned reforms, the more so that some of the results are not devoid of contradictions. Yet there is hardly any doubt as to their positive synergetic influence improving the overall investment climate in the Arab Republic of Egypt (ARE). The analyses supported by the latest consolidated statistics of the IMF reveal that the growth in ARE accelerated for four consecutive quarters, reaching 5.2% in July-September 2017, compared to 3.4% in the same quarter of the previous year, unemployment has declined, inflation continued to go down from the peaks reached following the pound floatation and energy price reforms, and the external position strengthened, while inflows exceeded original program expectations. Positive market sentiment reflects growing credibility of the economic management. To unlock Egypt’s growth potential, raise export competitiveness and create more private sector jobs, the authorities are enhancing the modern broad-based strategy of market-friendly reforms. In 2017, apart from the mentioned new investment law, the Egyptian parliament passed an industrial land and licensing law. Access to industrial land has become more readily available as nearly 17 mln sqm of land was provided in 2016/17 compared to 9.5 mln for the whole period of 2007-15. Key reforms in the pipeline include a new bankruptcy law and a single proprietor company law that aims to encourage small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). With improved overall confidence and growing credibility of the governmental program, the private sector entrepreneurship become more visible, and there is a growing interest by foreign investors, including in the newly established industrial free zones. Thus Egypt has been highlighted as the fastest growing location for start-ups with growth of over 100 percent in the previous year, reaching over 500 registered startups, and with very promising prospects for rapid growth.

The Landscapes of Early Automobile Registration and Licensing Laws: Creating New Jersey’s Department of Motor Vehicles, 1903 to 1957

The offices and facilities of New Jersey’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) are mundane boxes of concrete, glass, linoleum, and fluorescent lights, and yet they have a backstory to tell about the slow incorporation of the automobile into everyday American life at the turn of the twentieth century. Urban historians and geographers have attended to the development of everything from asphalt to stop signs, gas stations to automobile dealerships, motels to restaurants, bypass roads to the federal highway system, but not the government offices and facilities developed to service automobile regulation. The goal of this article is to detail the creation and evolution of DMV offices and facilities in the state of New Jersey, between 1903 and 1957: why they took the form they did and how they changed over time. These landscapes, perceived today as utterly ordinary and banal, are the tangible, physical expression of how people in the early 1900s struggled to live safely and fairly with the automobile.

Restoring Vision to Consumers and Competition to the Marketplace: Analyzing the Effects of Required Prescription Release

Occupational licensing laws can allow professionals to extract rents in the marketplace. In the case of vision services, optometrists have the authority to write prescriptions for contact lenses. Optometrists may choose to conceal this information and force patients to purchase lenses from the professional writing the prescription—resulting in vendor lock-in. In this paper, we investigate the possible effect of the 2004 Fairness to Contact Lens Consumers Act (FCLCA) on the market for vision services by examining state differences in prescription release mandates before 2004. We find that requiring professionals to release prescription information to patients resulted in a 10 to 11 percent reduction in the wages of optometrists. Our results provide some evidence that the FCLCA may have increased consumer welfare by reducing the prices of contact lenses or increasing access to contact lenses.

Virtue and the Law: The Good Moral Character Requirement in Occupational Licensing, Bar Regulation, and Immigration Proceedings

Character plays a crucial role in US law. This article explores flaws in how moral character requirements determine who can work in licensed occupations, who can practice law, and who can immigrate to the United States or become a citizen. Section I summarizes psychological research on character, which raises questions about a central legal premise that individuals have a settled disposition capable of accurately predicting their behavior independent of situational influences. Section II examines the role of moral character as an employment credential. Almost a third of the workforce is covered by licensing laws that typically require proof of good character and often unjustly penalize the seventy million Americans with criminal records. Section III examines the idiosyncratic and inconsistent application of moral character requirements for lawyers. Section IV focuses on similar flaws in immigration contexts. Section V identifies reform strategies to improve the fairness of character-related decisions in the law.

Beyond Physicians: The Effect of Licensing and Liability Laws on the Supply of Nurse Practitioners and Physician Assistants

Beyond Physicians: The Effect of Licensing and Liability Laws on the Supply of Nurse Practitioners and Physician Assistants

Theatrical Bubble and Squeak

“Theatrical Bubble and Squeak,” turns to the theatre of the mid Eighteenth century to consider the stage direction as both a leftover and the ingredients for a new theatrical dish. It takes as its example a prop, a dish of chocolate, used by the actor and playwright, Samuel Foote, to evade legal restrictions on the type of theatre that could be performed on an ‘illegitimate’ stage. By inviting his audience to ‘take a dish of chocolate’ with him, Foote recast his play at the Haymarket as a private tea party. The chocolate, I argue, is a prop that doubles as a cultural leftover: of an ingenious strategy devised to evade licensing laws; of the coffee-house audience that Foote sought to tempt away from the patent theatres; and of a theatrical environment that had legal reasons for not committing performance to paper. Yet being a leftover did not mean that the chocolate could not serve up a new theatrical dish, and this article shows how Foote's chocolate came to symbolise theatre that dispensed medicinal, subversive and sometimes toxic doses of personal satire.Foote may have performed his plays under the guise of diverting the audience's time (while the chocolate was being prepared), but his performances always finished before the chocolate arrived onstage. This essay suggests that there is a parallel between the imaginative activity prompted in Foote's audiences by the absent dish of chocolate, and the activity required to imagine the stage directions that we sense to be missing from Eighteenth-century playtexts. It is often the case, in Eighteenth-century scripts, that we encounter a blank space where we know stage business to have been performed. The dish of chocolate discussed in this essay enables us to think about stage directions, and about what was leftover and left out of Eighteenth-century playtexts.

A multiyear assessment of a hospital-school program to promote teen motor vehicle safety.

Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death among teen drivers. The main goal of this program was to reduce texting while driving among high school teens through a unique peer-generated anti-texting campaign. The program consisted of two phases. In phase 1, student leaders participated in a half-day, hospital-based experiential program that emphasized safe teen driving. In phase 2, these students conceptualized and implemented an anti-texting while driving campaign during the school year. The program enrolled 32 schools with 137 student participants in phase 1. This study uses a prospective quasi-experimental pre-post design. A presurvey and a follow-up online survey were used. Response rate was 81%. In phase 2, two rounds of observations of drivers were made near the participating schools at the beginning and end of the phase 2 campaign. The results were analyzed using proportion tests. There was a strong belief (6.49 on a seven-point scale) that texting while driving could result in a crash. About 58% had texted while driving in the previous 7 days in the pre-survey. This proportion decreased significantly to 44% in the follow-up (p < 0.05). Knowledge of Tennessee Graduated Driver Licensing laws and feeling of empowerment to take action with a teen driver who was texting improved significantly (p < 0.05). In phase 2, 12,309 drivers (adults and teens) were observed in the first round, and 13,153 were observed in the second round of observations. Significant reduction in the proportion of drivers texting while driving (from 13% to 9%; p < 0.0001) was observed. Results of driver observations support the effectiveness of this program in meeting the key objective of reducing texting while driving. The program also influenced teenagers' willingness to take positive steps when faced with a driver who was texting. Future efforts should aim to influence social and peer norms. Therapeutic study, level IV.

Clinical Use of a Home Sleep Apnea Test: An Updated American Academy of Sleep Medicine Position Statement.

The diagnosis and effective treatment of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) in adults is an urgent health priority. It is the position of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) that only a medical provider can diagnose medical conditions such as OSA and primary snoring. Throughout this statement, the term "medical provider" refers to a licensed physician and any other health care professional who is licensed to practice medicine in accordance with state licensing laws and regulations. A home sleep apnea test (HSAT) is an alternative to polysomnography for the diagnosis of OSA in uncomplicated adults presenting with signs and symptoms that indicate an increased risk of moderate to severe OSA. It is also the position of the AASM that: the need for, and appropriateness of, an HSAT must be based on the patient's medical history and a face-to-face examination by a medical provider, either in person or via telemedicine; an HSAT is a medical assessment that must be ordered by a medical provider to diagnose OSA or evaluate treatment efficacy; an HSAT should not be used for general screening of asymptomatic populations; diagnosis, assessment of treatment efficacy, and treatment decisions must not be based solely on automatically scored HSAT data, which could lead to sub-optimal care that jeopardizes patient health and safety; and the raw data from the HSAT device must be reviewed and interpreted by a physician who is either board-certified in sleep medicine or overseen by a board-certified sleep medicine physician.

“The vice of distant knowledge”: Licensing and the geography of jurisdiction on the Scottish wartime Home Front

This article considers how licensing law conceives and practices jurisdiction. It examines the limits of attempts to define and exploit jurisdiction in the regulation of social problems connected to alcohol. Using the case study of a prohibition on the sale of spirits in the Scottish town of Motherwell during the First World War, it analyses how ‘vertical’ legal appeals through higher courts intersected with everyday ‘horizontal’ challenges to the jurisdiction of the local licensing magistrates as the ban pushed drinkers and the problems of drunkenness onto neighbouring authorities. Those higher court challenges importantly confirmed the localness of licensing, but they could not guarantee the effectiveness of the magistrates’ policy. By showing the potentially disruptive daily habits of ordinary citizens and urban infrastructure, the article promotes a social and material legal geography of licensing. In conclusion, it calls for a critical examination of the ‘local’ in local government, and the political geographies that result from appeals to space and scale in the division of governance functions.

Intellectual Property License Contracts: Reflections on a Prospective UNCITRAL Project

IP licenses are the leading lady of the information age. The economic and strategic significance of this contract archetype have grown exponentially over the past 40 years. Under this glaring spotlight, it has become increasingly apparent that the legal framework governing these voluntary exchanges is not supportive of the role they play in the modern digital environment. At the domestic level, the applicable rules are often lacunose and suffer from doctrinal underdevelopment; moreover, they are scattered throughout diverse areas of the law, yielding legal uncertainty and rendering a holistic appraisal onerous. Internationally, a comparative analysis of IP licensing regimes reveals a jarring lack of alignment across jurisdictions that severely hinders cross-border transactions. For over a decade, the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (“UNCITRAL”) has been contemplating the possibility of a project to promote the modernization and harmonization of IP licensing law. During this time, UNCITRAL Member States have continued to grapple with lingering reservations, yet support has grown steadily among practitioners and academics, and is verging on achieving critical mass. This paper provides the theoretical infrastructure for such a project by expounding its possible scope, content and form. The objective of the present enquiry is not to articulate or advocate a single, concrete proposal. Rather, its aim is to identify the policy choices and legal issues that UNCITRAL Member States would face in the elaboration of this project, and coextensively lend color to the decision-making processes that would be required to attain consensus solutions.

Does Permitless Carry Raise Murder Rates?

Many American states are repealing concealed weapon licensing laws, allowing anyone who may lawfully possess a gun (sometimes limited to residents of the state), to carry a gun concealed without a license. This article examines the question of whether such laws affect murder rates, and if so, in what direction.

The Labor‐Market Effects of Occupational Licensing Laws in Nursing

We study the labor‐market impacts of occupational licensing laws on nursing, an economically important occupation. States adopted licensing of registered and practical nurses at different times, which allows us to estimate the effects of licensing on wages and participation for each nursing profession. We find that licensure raised wages by 5 to 10 percent but there is no evidence that it reduced overall participation. Additionally, we show that licensure equalizes wages within the occupation with minority wages rising faster than nonminority wages; however, licensing had a negative but not statistically significant impact on the participation of minorities in nursing.

Beyond Physicians: The Effect of Licensing and Liability Laws on the Supply of Nurse Practitioners and Physician Assistants

The increased use of nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs) represents an important option for increasing access to healthcare. I explore the effect of two types of laws on the supply of NPs and PAs: (1) occupational licensing laws that limit the practices of NPs and PAs and (2) caps on noneconomic damages. I find that relaxing licensing laws to allow NPs to practice with less physician oversight increases the supply of NPs in areas with few practicing physicians by 60 percent — though the size of this increase decreases as the supply of physicians increases. I find a similar effect of licensing laws that grant greater PA autonomy on the supply of PAs, but this effect is not consistently statistically significant. Noneconomic damages caps increase the supply of both NPs and PAs by about 60 percent at the lowest levels of physician supply, but the size of this increase decreases as the physician supply grows. I also examine the effects of these laws on the probability that a county contains a health professional shortage area. The results of this analysis indicate that licensing laws have meaningful effects on access to care.

The Linkage of the Board of Directors and the Status of Aviation Industry Licensing Law

Aviation business is a capital intensive and high risk in terms of safety. Legislation in force in Indonesia requires enterprises should cost in the form of a limited liability company that is obliged to deposit the basic capital of 500 billion rupiah. The capital cannot be made in working capital which is useful for the collateral to a third party. The regulations for a limited liability company are to be established by at least 2 people. The purpose of this research is to analyze the linkage of the board directors and the status of aviation industry licensing law. The position of the legal status of business entities where shareholder is only one person is to be studied in this descriptive study. The result shows that the airlines company should provide the capital risk and high insurance of the third party. UUPT also has given the authority of the shareholders (who owns 20 % of the share) to be decision makers in the company. However, without independent surveillance, it is possible that the shareholders do some mistakes in making decisions. Some mistakes are related to the policy, the using of authorized capital, and others. Aviation business is a capital intensive and high risk in terms of safety. Legislation in force in Indonesia requires enterprises should cost in the form of a limited liability company that is obliged to deposit the basic capital of 500 billion rupiah. The capital cannot be made in working capital which is useful for the collateral to a third party. The regulations for a limited liability company are to be established by at least 2 people. The position of the legal status of business entities where shareholder is only one person is to be studied in this descriptive study.

Competitive effects of scope of practice restrictions: Public health or public harm?

The demand for healthcare professionals is predicted to grow significantly over the next decade. Securing an adequate workforce is of primary importance to ensure the health and wellbeing of the population in an efficient manner. Occupational licensing laws and related restrictions on scope of practice (SOP) are features of the market for healthcare professionals and are also controversial. At issue is a balance between protecting the public health and removing anticompetitive barriers to entry and practice. In this paper, we examine the case of SOP restrictions for certified nurse midwives (CNMs) and evaluate the effects of changes in states’ SOP laws on markets for CNMs and on maternal and infant outcomes. We find that SOP laws are neither helpful nor harmful in regards to health outcomes but states that have no SOP-based barriers have lower rates of induced labor and Cesarean section births. We discuss the implications for state policy.

State Definitions of Social Work Practice: Implications for our Professional Identity

ABSTRACTPurpose: For over a century, the social work profession has been concerned with describing the unique and specific characteristics that define its core functions in society; however, the profession has yet to agree to a single definition of social work. In the absence of a unifying definition, 51 different statutory definitions of social work have been created by each state and the District of Columbia. Methods: Using qualitative methods, each statutory definition of social work was analyzed to gain an understanding of how social work is defined and understood across the United States. Results: Findings indicate that 57% of the statutory language blend the full range of micro to macro social work practice skills into their definition. However, even within these and those remaining, there are vast differences in definitions. Discussion: Implications for state licensing laws, are considered, along with how this impacts education, the work force, and professional identity.

The Demand for Healthcare Regulation: The Effect of Political Spending on Occupational Licensing Laws

Using data on political spending in state elections, this study considers the role of political contributions by healthcare professional interest groups in states' decisions to enact occupational licensing laws. These laws govern how different professions may operate in healthcare markets, and while they ostensibly exist to protect consumers, licensing laws can also insulate professionals from competition in healthcare markets. Higher political spending by physician interest groups increases the probability that a state maintains licensing laws restricting the practices of nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs). Conversely, increased spending by hospital interest groups increases the probability that a state allows NPs and PAs to practice with more autonomy. Nurse groups, which include groups affiliated with NPs, have a smaller effect on licensing laws. And nonphysician groups, which include groups affiliated with PAs, have almost no effect on licensing laws. These results are consistent with the investment theory of political spending.

Restoring Vision to Consumers and Competition to the Marketplace: Analyzing the Effects of the 2004 FCLCA

Occupational licensing laws can create monopoly power for professionals in the marketplace. In the case of vision services, optometrists have the authority to write prescriptions for contact lenses, and this can result in professionals excluding information to force patients to purchase lenses from the professional writing the prescription. In this paper, we estimate the effect of the Fairness to Contact Lens Consumers Act (FCLCA) on the market for vision services. We find that requiring professionals to release prescription information to patients resulted in a 10-11% reduction in the wages of optometrists. We are unable to find evidence that the change affected the labor market for opticians.

The Laws of Social Reproduction: A Lesson in Appropriation

This article offers insights into the law’s appropriation of women’s reproductive labour, namely, the intimate labours that they typically carry out in the context of marriage to biologically, socially, emotionally and culturally reproduce members of the household by offering a range of goods and services. Feminist legal scholars have long demonstrated the law’s failure to recognise, much less value, such reproductive labour. Where the law does recognise such labour, feminists argue that it is largely within the parameters of the institution of heterosexual marriage to the exclusion of other organisational forms. The article extends this line of feminist legal critique to reveal feminists’ own reluctance within the debates on social reproduction to recognise the reproductive labour performed by women outside the family and explicitly for the market. Through a cross-sectoral comparison of the law’s regulation of three such sectors of women’s abject labour, namely, sex work, bar-dancing and commercial surrogacy, the article demonstrates how, despite their regulation through criminal law, licensing law and contract law, there are several structural similarities in the political economies of these sectors. Consequently, any change in the rule network pertaining to any one sector of women’s reproductive labour affects women in that sector but also in other sectors. The article argues that it is only through an examination of the deep interconnectedness between sectors of women’s reproductive labour that feminists can assess whether an alternative regulatory matrix would further women’s claims to economic justice.