West Virginia University law professor Valarie Blake co-authored an article published at The Conversation with political science professor Simon Haeder on December 17, 2018. The article is titled "Why the Texas ruling on Obamacare is on shaky legal ground" and discusses the opinion federal judge in Texas which struck down the entire Affordable Care Act on the grounds that its mandate requiring people to buy health insurance is unconstitutional and the rest of the law cannot stand without it. Professors Black and Haeder argue that the ACA is well settled law and that politics have heavily shaped this case.

Read more of Professor Blake's scholarship on SSRN.

West Virginia University law professor Valarie Blake is contributing to the U.S. Feminist Judgments Project by rewriting Doe v. Mutual of Omaha. The case deals with the issue of whether the Americans with Disabilities Act prohibits private insurers from discriminating against patients with AIDS. The U.S. Feminist Judgments Project is a collaborative effort of more than 100 feminist law professors to rewrite U.S. legal decisions from a feminist perspective. They have produced a series of volumes of rewritten opinions in the area tax, torts, corporations, trusts and estates, employment discrimination, family law, and reproductive justice. 

Professor Blake participated in a workshop on December 7, 2018 with other commentators and opinion writers at Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law.

West Virginia University College of Law professor Valarie Blake presented at the Utah Law Review Symposium on Friday, November 30, 2018. The symposium is titled "The Opioid Crisis: Paths Forward to Mitigate Regulatory Failure". The symposium was designed to examine failures of the pharmaceutical market, inadequate regulatory responses, and possible solutions. Scholars discussed the impact of regulation from the national and state level, the impact of addiction on communities, and how public health research should inform future policy and regulation decisions.

Professor Blake participated in a panel discussion, "State Regulation: Failures and Paths Moving Forward".

On Friday, November 2, 2018, WVU Law Professor Valarie Blake will speak at Yale Law School in New Haven, CT.  Professor Blake is participating in a symposium titled "The Law and Policy of AI, Robotics, and Telemedicine in Health Care".  The symposium is jointly hosted by the Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy and the Information Society Project.

From the symposium website:
The interdisciplinary roundtable will take on a broad a range of questions at the intersection of medicine, robotics, and artificial intelligence, including the regulatory challenges of telemedicine, the privacy implications of these technological developments, evolving liability regimes for modern medical technologies, the impact of these challenges on health care disparities, costs and the doctor-patient relationships, and the political and financial realities of these advances in health science.

West Virginia University College of Law Professor Valarie Blake will speak today at the Indiana Health Law Review Symposium: The Intersection of Immigration Law and Health Policy .

Professor Blake will participate in a panel with other human rights experts to talk specifically about civil rights and Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, and how it expands anti-discrimination protections for immigrants in health care.