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The Government's latest attempts to reform the House of Lords coincide with a number of significant anniversaries of previous attempts. This article notes the Secretary of State for Justice's adoption of the 100th anniversary of the Parliament Act 1911 as a target to get the reform legislation through, examines what can be learnt from those previous attempts and suggests that the debate over election versus appointment may involve a false dichotomy.

There is, without question, a public health crisis in the United States arising from both illicit and prescription opioid misuse, addiction, and overdose. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is one regulator with an important role to play in minimizing the harms associated with prescription opioids, while also ensuring that prescription opioids are available for the evidence-based management of pain. One question, however, is to what extent the agency can consider in its decisions to approve opioids and keep existing ones on the market the provider and patient behaviors contributing to the epidemic. This is, in part, because FDA’s approval of drugs is often understood as narrowly focused on weighing the benefits and risks of the products as defined in the preapproval clinical trials that are used to set the drug’s official FDA-approved indication. Such a limited focus would exclude important information about the real-world use and public-health impact of prescription opioids and other drugs with externalities. This Article argues that, to better regulate drugs like opioids that have such externalities, one step FDA should take is to use a “public health” perspective in its approval (and withdrawal) decisions. The Article describes how the federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act authorizes FDA to take this broad approach in its drug approval and withdrawal decisions and offers some principles for implementing this approach systematically.Citation: Patricia J. Zettler, Margaret Foster Riley, and Aaron S. Kesselheim, Implementing a Public Health Perspective in FDA Drug Regulation, 73 Food & Drug L.J. 221 (2018).Posted with the permission of the Food and Drug Law Institute.

This article builds on theories about the expressive function of law and uses Structural Topic Modelling to examine how the prioritisation of civil and political rights (CPR) issues by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) has affected the agendas of Cambodian human rights NGOs with an international profile. It asks whether these NGOs’ focus on CPR issues can be traced back to the near-exclusive focus on CPR issues by the court, and whether this has implications for the creation of a “thick” kind of human rights accountability. It argues that, considering the nature of the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal policy, it would have been within the mandate and capacity of the court to pay more attention to actions that also constituted violations of economic, social, and cultural rights (ESCR). The fact that the court did not do this and instead almost completely obscured ESCR rhetorically has triggered a similar blind spot for ESCR issues on the part of human rights NGOs, which could have otherwise played an important role in creating a culture of accountability around this category of human rights. Does this mean that violators of ESCR are more likely to escape prosecution going forward?