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Summary. This piece explores the similarities and differences between the ethical and regulatory issues raised by direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs and those raised by the promotion of foods for their purported health-benefits.

Summary. The general public is skeptical of our current system of campaign finance and feels that members of Congress are corrupt. Although the scholarly literature on campaign contribution influence is mixed, there is growing consensus that Political Action Committees (PACs) and interest groups do, indeed, have a powerful influence on policymaking in Congress. In this article, the author reviews this literature and discusses how influence occurs. Findings reveal that influence is only very rarely an explicit quid pro quo exchange. Instead, it is typically an ongoing, implicit, reciprocal exchange that impacts multiple stages of the legislative process and yields contributors many dividends, such as softer regulations, lower taxes, and lucrative contracts—none of which are explicitly promised (except in rare cases of full-blown bribery), but are, nonetheless, regularly granted. The social relationships between contributors and lawmakers are central to this process, as is the ability to get legislators to sway their colleagues.

Summary. Physicians discriminate among trials of varying degrees of rigor, but industry sponsorship negatively influences their perception of methodologic quality and reduces their willingness to believe and act on trial findings, independently of the trial's quality. These effects may influence the translation of clinical research into practice.

Summary. “Blind expertise” has been proposed as an institutional solution to the problem of bias in expert witness testimony in litigation, as a way to improve litigation outcomes. At the request of a litigant, an intermediary selects a qualified expert and pays the expert to review a case without knowing which side requested the opinion. This paper reports an experiment that tests the hypothesis that, compared to traditional experts, such “blinded experts” will be more persuasive to jurors. A national sample of mock jurors (N = 275) watched an online video of a staged medical malpractice trial, including testimony from two medical experts, one of which (or neither, in the control condition) was randomly assigned to be a blind expert. We also manipulated whether the judge provided a special jury instruction explaining the blinding concept.

Summary. This article begins with a simple empirical claim – that professionals (doctors, lawyers, and psychologists, among others) may either facilitate or prevent human rights violations. They possess this power by virtue of their expertise, access and social status. Building on this claim, I argue that states are dependent upon the assistance of professionals in order to comply with their international human rights obligations. Compliance with these obligations is an essential condition of the legitimacy of states; non-compliance is a matter of global concern and, if systemic, renders the state liable to interference from external agents in the international community. It follows that states are, in this fundamental respect, dependent upon professionals. But professionals are also dependent upon states; their ability to perform their professional functions in full is contingent upon privileges and protections accorded to them by the state. Given this mutual dependence, I advance a contractarian account of the relationship between professionals and the state – one that gives rise to a duty on the part of professionals to assist the state with the performance of its human rights obligations. The content of that duty varies across professions and among professionals, since it depends upon the nature of the professional’s expertise, and the degree of access and social status she possesses. This account offers both theoretical and practical benefits. First, it avoids human rights foundationalism because it ties the ethical obligations of professionals to international legal norms, rather than to human rights conceived as ethical claims. Second, the account offers a further approach for bridging the gap that scholars and advocates have identified between human rights commitments and compliance. The incorporation of human rights norms into domestic law, political institutions and corporate governance may all contribute to this. But the essential role professionals can play in the acculturation of and compliance with human rights has been neglected. The account advanced here has a number of important practical implications – not least, the need for more (and better) human rights education and mentorship for professionals.

Summary. This essay explores the ethical issues raised by the promotion of foods for their purported health benefits, and compares the U.S. and E.U. regulatory frameworks governing such claims.

Summary. The modern capitalist society, characterized by decentralized decision making and increasingly sophisticated products and services, turns on relationships of epistemic reliance, where laypersons depend upon advisors to guide their most important decisions. Yet many of those advisors lack real expertise and may be biased by conflicting interests. In such situations, laypersons are likely to make suboptimal decisions that sometimes aggregate into systematic failures, from soaring health care costs to market crashes. Regulators can attempt to manage the symptoms and worst abuses, but the fundamental problem of biased advice will remain. There are many potential policy solutions, from outright bans on conflicting interests to disclosure mandates, yet their comparative effectiveness is poorly understood. By constructing a decision task for human subjects and providing advice in various scenarios, this Article reports new experiments testing alternative policy mechanisms. Prior research has shown that disclosure mandates can be deleterious if they make advisors more biased, but this paper contextualizes those findings. It turns out that disclosures may be valuable in settings where relative expertise is low, but deleterious where relative expertise is high. By also disaggregating the data, one finds that disclosures of conflicting interests may hurt laypersons in the majority of situations where the conflicted advice is not actually biased. Thus, the evidence suggests that, if they are to be at all effective, disclosure mandates should be narrowly tailored. Most importantly, the evidence shows that a disclosure mandate improves layperson performance when unbiased advisors are also available. Yet laypersons appear to be poor judges of their need for unbiased advice, so market mechanisms may be ineffective for provisioning unbiased advice. In the end, the presence of an unbiased advisor is the strongest determinant of layperson performance, and thus policymakers must develop ways of aligning the interests of advisors and laypersons. Pay-for-performance, blinding of experts, and mandatory or subsidized second-opinion policies are likely to be helpful in aligning these interests.

Summary. This piece argues that, while considerable attention has been paid to financial conflicts of interest involving the pharmaceutical industry, conflicts involving the food and soda industries have been neglected. Such conflicts call for urgent attention from both scholars and policymakers.