The seventh Faculty Pub Night of the 2021-2022 season features Rebecca Delfino, clinical professor of law (LMU Loyola Law School). She will discuss her recent publications:

• The Prescription Abuse Prevention Act: A New Federal Statute to Criminalize Overprescribing Opioids
• A New Prescription for the Opioid Epidemic: 360-Degree Accountability for Pharmaceutical Companies and Their Executives

Note: If you are interested in attending this event, please RSVP here or select the "Register" button on this page.

About Faculty Pub Night: 

Students, staff, faculty, alumni, and any members of the public are all invited to the 2021-2022 series of Faculty Pub Night at the William H. Hannon Library. Eight LMU professors are selected annually to discuss their latest publication or project in a comfortable setting and format that welcomes diverse perspectives for an inclusive conversation aimed to educate the entire community. All Faculty Pub Nights are free and open to the public.

About the Author's Work:

We are in a national crisis--an epidemic of opioid addiction and abuse--that has claimed the lives of nearly a million Americans at the cost of more than 500 billion dollars to the economy in the last twenty years.  Even now, on average, 140 people die every day from an opioid overdose, making it a leading cause of injury-related death in the United States.  Seventy percent of those deaths involve an opioid that a doctor legally prescribed. And the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has made the opioid epidemic even worse.  

There is a growing sense that those responsible for the opioid epidemic--doctors, drug companies, and pharmaceutical executives--have escaped responsibility for their role in creating the opioid crisis. Although some have confronted civil lawsuits, the pharmaceutical industry and doctors have faced virtually no criminal scrutiny. This raises questions:  Given the increasing number of opioid overdose deaths nationally, why are charges and convictions of drug companies and doctors so rare? And why haven’t existing legal mechanisms worked to punish the improper practices and curb the epidemic? 

Rebecca Delfino has spent the last several years examining the evolution of opioid epidemic and answering these questions through the lens of criminal law.  Her scholarship examines concrete and omnibus solutions grounded in federal law to address the conduct of the pharmaceutical industry and opioid prescribers.  Her proposals appear in The Prescription Abuse Prevention Act: A New Federal Statute to Criminalize Overprescribing Opioids, 39 YALE L. & POL’Y REV. (forthcoming, 2021), Loyola Law School, Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2020-03, and A New Prescription For The Opioid Epidemic: 360-Degree Accountability For Pharmaceutical Companies And Their Executives, 73 Hastings L.J., XX (forthcoming Fall 2021/Winter2022), Loyola Law School, Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2021-03.

About the Author:

Rebecca Delfino’s scholarship focuses on the intersection of current culture, crisis, criminal law, and the courts. She is particularly interested in the role that federalism plays in response to these issues.  In addition to her scholarship on opioids, her recent scholarship investigates the criminalization of “deepfakes” and their impact on the justice system.  

At LMU Loyola Law School, she teaches Appellate Advocacy, California Civil Procedure, Legal Ethics, Negotiations, Judicial Process, and Advanced Revision and Writing.  In addition to teaching, she is the Faculty Director of the Field Placement Department at Loyola. She serves as the Faculty Director of Loyola’s nationally recognized and award-winning Moot Court Program.  Before joining the law faculty, she spent 25 years as an Appellate Attorney at the California Court of Appeal and in private practice in national civil litigation firms.  Her trial and appellate work touched numerous areas of law, from felony criminal cases to complex civil litigation, to family law and probate, to juvenile dependency and delinquency matters. As a litigator, she handled all phases of civil litigation in a variety of cases from complex multi-party product defect and construction cases to white-collar criminal defense, to the protection of intellectual property rights, to the defense of employment discrimination claims on behalf of individual clients as well as Fortune 500 companies including Motorola, Disney, Dow Corning, and General Motors.

About the William H. Hannon Library:

The William H. Hannon Library fosters excellence in academic achievement through an array of distinctive services that enable learners to feed their curiosity, experience new worlds, develop their ideas, inform their decision-making, and inspire others. More information can be found at http://library.lmu.edu

For more information about this event, contact John Jackson, Head of Outreach & Engagement for the William H. Hannon Library, at (310) 338-5234 or john.jackson@lmu.edu.