The 2009 pandemic of influenza A (H1N1) was relatively mild, but a subsequent outbreak of pandemic influenza could be much worse. According to projections from the Department of Health and Human Services, the potential health consequences of a severe (1918-like) influenza pandemic in the United States could be literally overwhelming: up to 1.9 million deaths; 90 million people sick; 45 million people needing outpatient care; 9.9 million people hospitalized, of whom 1.485 million would need treatment in an intensive care unit (ICU); and 742,500 patients needing mechanical ventilators. Even a less cataclysmic, moderate pandemic (like 1958 or 1968) would result in 209,000 deaths; 90 million people sick; 45 million people needing outpatient care; 865,000 people hospitalized, of whom 128,750 would need treatment in an ICU; and 64,875 patients needing mechanical ventilators.

Interdisciplinary teaching can be a hard sell to the legal academic community. Over almost three decades, I have spoken at conferences on a variety of subjects. When I have presented on this particular topic, however, I have drawn my most meager crowds. Is it because we think interdisciplinary pedagogy is a bad idea, that we are ill-equipped, or that it is generally too difficult to do successfully? After a dozen years of creating and teaching an interdisciplinary course in law and medicine, I confess that it is now my other, law-only courses that I feel I have to justify. Why is an interdisciplinary approach to teaching law the exception rather than the rule?

My path to creating an interdisciplinary course in law and medicine (MedLaw) began indirectly and with impatience at my own teaching of family law. I had been a professor of family law for decades, and I had developed a sophisticated set of simulations that asked students to negotiate a settlement in a marital dissolution case.

Through the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the United States expanded its size by over 800,000 square miles. But neither President Thomas Jefferson nor Congress knew exactly what they had bought until 1806, when Meriwether Lewis and William Clark returned from their famous expedition. One of the most significant contributions of the Expedition was a better perception of the geography of the Northwest. Lewis and Clark prepared approximately 140 maps and filled in the main outlines of the previously blank map of the northwestern United States. Robert I. Field has done much the same for the vast territory of U.S. health care regulation.

On the front cover of Fields new book, Health Care Regulation in America: Complexity, Confrontation, and Compromise, is a picture of a giant three-dimensional labyrinth. Rarely is cover art so perfectly appropriate.

A 2009 decision by a Florida state trial court marks a recent addition to the long line of cases authorizing compelled medical treatment of pregnant women for the benefit of their unborn children. Despite recurring judicial and academic consideration of the issues involved, there is no consensus regarding the correct approach to take in cases that pit a woman's right to refuse medical treatment against the state's interest in protecting fetal health. Burton v. Florida, currently under appeal to Florida's First District Court of Appeals, demonstrates the difficulty of emergency decision-making in this area and the need for robust ex ante consideration of the important interests at stake.

In March 2009, pursuant to a petition by the State of Florida, the Leon County Circuit Court overrode a pregnant woman's informed refusal to consent to medical treatment, and ordered her to remain a hospital inpatient and submit to medical treatment.