Experts to Debate 2010 Health Care Act

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Two experts on national health care will debate the pros and cons of universal health care insurance and the Affordable Care Act at 11:45 a.m. Tuesday, Feb. 22, in the E.J. Ball Courtroom at the University of Arkansas School of Law. The program is approved for one hour of general continuing legal education credit, and the event is free and open to the public.

Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute and editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review, and Rob Leflar, the Arkansas Bar Foundation Professor of Law at the University of Arkansas, will discuss the issues surrounding the U.S. health care debate. Before joining the Cato Institute, Shapiro was a special assistant and adviser to the Multi-National Force in Iraq on rule of law issues and practiced international, political, commercial and antitrust litigation at Patton Boggs and Cleary Gottlieb. Shapiro has contributed to a variety of academic, popular and professional publications, including the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Los Angeles Times, Washington Times, Legal Times, Weekly Standard, Roll Call and National Review Online, and from 2004 to 2007 wrote the "Dispatches from Purple America" column for TCS Daily.com.

He also regularly provides commentary on a host of legal and political issues for various TV and radio outlets, including CNN, Fox News, ABC, CBS, NBC, Univision, "The Colbert Report," and American Public Media's "Marketplace." He is a member of the board of visitors of the Legal Studies Institute at The Fund for American Studies, was an inaugural Washington Fellow at the National Review Institute and has been an adjunct professor at the George Washington University Law School.

Leflar's teaching and research focus on torts, health law and related fields. He teaches first-year torts and upper-level courses and seminars in product liability, health law and policy, bioethics and law, and defamation and privacy. Leflar has been awarded several fellowships for study in Japan, including a Fulbright grant, Japan Foundation fellowship and, most recently, grants from the Center for Global Partnership and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science for a research project comparing medical quality control in Japan and the United States.

He has lectured, often in Japanese, at Tokyo University and other universities in Japan and at Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania and several international conferences. He has published articles about Japan in American, Japanese and European journals. His book (in Japanese) on the development of informed consent in Japanese medicine and law was published in 2002. He has lectured widely in the United States on the current health care debate.

The program is sponsored by the Federalist Society of the University of Arkansas School of Law with special funding by the John Templeton Foundation.