Et Tu, Counselor: may an in-house attorney file a qui tam action against the attorney's employer?

Most corporations probably do not consider their in-house counsel to be potential qui tam threats. That may be a naive assumption. Case law provides an illustrative view of the legal ramifications involved when an attorney brings a qui tam suit. In general, there is no prohibition on attorneys who wish to bring these actions. Nevertheless, a corporation can take preventive steps to eliminate the likelihood of attorney qui tam actions. In addition, the corporation can take advantage of state professional ethics laws to mount a defensive action against the attorney who files any such action.     

Methodological challenges to government sampling techniques in civil fraud and abuse cases

This Article discusses the use of statistical sampling in Medicare and Medicaid fraud and abuse audits. The author reviews cases in which government sampling methodologies have been challenged. Finally, the author describes the various alternatives available for challenging the validity of the statistical sampling used by the government in its audits.     

The continuing search for proper perspective: whose reasonableness should be at issue in a prescription product design defect analysis?

This Article is based on a presentation given at Seton Hall University School of Law's Seventh Annual Health Law Symposium on February 12, 1999.     

Market failure,government failure,and the private supply of public goods: The case of climate-controlled walkway networks

Two opposing models of public-goods undersupply are those of “market failure” and “government failure”. Empirical work on the relative explanatory power of these two frameworks has been limited by the scarcity of acceptable data. The case of climate-controlled walkways in major urban cores is a rare instance where such difficulties can be overcome. We investigate the supply of CCWs in 55 large city-cores in North America. We find that (1) CCW networks are well-supplied by market forces, when (2) such forces are not frustrated by government policy. We also find evidence that (3) rules-based regimes dominate discretion-based regimes. These results are consistent with the position that the “government-failure” paradigm is a viable alternative to the traditional “market failure” paradigm.     

Specificity versus representativeness: methodological approaches to the study of Mexico-U.S. migration

"This article compares two sources of data on Mexico-U.S. migration, based on radically different methodologies: the Mexican Migration Project (Promig) and the National Survey of Population Dynamics (Enadid).... This comparative study shows that a micro-social design drawing on multiple community samples, such as Promig, can solve the methodological conflict between specificity and representativeness.... The authors' research also highlights the problem of selectivity and specificity entailed by traditional surveys such as Enadid as a result of restricting their samples to international residents in Mexico and attempting to explain such a complex, socioeconomic process using a limited number of variables." (EXCERPT)