Reflections of a 3L, Installment One: Put Down That Book and Go To the Gym; or, Yes, You Do Have Time.

As I’m very, very fond of telling people, I am now a 3L.  A 3L in my last semester, no less.  Actually, I will graduate exactly 100 days from today.  (Awesome.)  So I’ve been reflecting a bit lately on my law school career, and I’ve noticed that there are ways I could have managed parts of it better.  As many of you already likely know, I have a general propensity to dispense unasked-for advice.  Lucky for me, Professor O’Hear kindly offered me the opportunity to climb up on my e-soap box here. (Thanks so much for that!)  Thus I bring you…

Reflections of a 3L, Installment One: Put Down That Book and Go To the Gym; or, Yes, You Do Have Time.

The more you move your body, the more energy you have to move your body.  Exercise introduces endorphins into your system that make the daily grind seem smoother.  And my mother swears – though I’m pretty sure she’s making this up – that your body will grow new blood vessels to your brain if you exercise on a regular basis.  As my fellow 3L Staci Flinchbaugh put it, there is just no downside to exercising.  Not that I’ve been doing it much during law school.  Ok, at all.   I haven’t been exercising at all.  There was never a time when I decided, “Ok, absolutely no more physical activity for me aside from pack-muling these books to and from class.”  It just happened by increments.  Not today, I have that brief due.  Not today, I am super far behind in my reading.  Etc.  I even signed up for a Pilates class my first semester.  Alas, my attendance was short-lived.  And it likely resulted in a group of undergrads who still discuss the weird woman who came to Pilates and kept falling asleep on the mat.  

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Health Care Magnet?

Last January, I published a piece in WI Interest, the journal of the Wisconsin Public Policy Research Institute, arguing that the drafters of Healthy Wisconsin — or any similar program purporting to enact a universal entitlement to health care in a single state — could not constitutionally impose a residency requirement, creating the risk of health care migration and the associated problems of adverse selection. I did not seek to explore whether such migration would occur or who would migrate. I speculated, in fact, that the migrants would not be poor people, but those who are older or high risk.

WPRI has now published a study evaluating the probability of such migration. I have not yet carefully examined it, but I continue to believe that such migration (and the Supreme Court precedent that protects it) is a serious obstacle to state efforts to enact some form of universal health care and, for that matter, a variety of other initiatives that states may undertake in their once honored roles as “laboratories for democracy.”

Cross posted at PrawfsBlawg and Shark and Shepherd.

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Can High Medical Bills Cost You Your Job?

In an article in today’s Chicago Tribune, our colleague Paul Secunda suggests that the risks of this happening are higher in the current economic climate.  The article concerns a federal lawsuit in which the plaintiff alleges she was fired because of her husband’s medical bills, which were covered through her employer’s medical plan.  The Seventh Circuit recently reversed the trial court’s dismissal of her claim.  Federal law, of course, generally prohibits employment actions that discriminate on the basis of disability, which may provide a legal foundation for some claims like those of the plaintiff in the Seventh Circuit case.

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