Health Law Advisor

President Trump’s Executive Order 14321, Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets (“EO 14321”), signed on July 24, 2025, directs federal agencies to expand the use of civil commitment for people experiencing homelessness who have a serious mental illness or substance use disorder. A year later, EO 14321 has sharpened a long-running national debate over when the government may compel treatment; the tension is often described as one between care and coercion. For hospitals and behavioral health organizations—and the lawyers who advise them—EO 14321’s practical effect runs less through new legal standards, which remain a matter of state law, than through federal funding conditions.

On May 1, 2026, Pennsylvania’s State Board of Medicine (or “Petitioner”) filed a lawsuit in the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania—alleging that an artificial intelligence (“AI”) chatbot developed by Character Technologies, Inc. (or “Respondent”) engaged in the unlawful practice of medicine.

Every now and then a confusing knot of rules gets streamlined and untangled. That recently occurred in New Jersey, when the state’s Supreme Court adopted a new  unified Mental Health  Service Provider – Patient Privilege, to replace the state’s existing patchwork of privileges which offer varying, and sometimes inconsistent, degrees of protection to communications between mental healthcare professionals and their patients. The new privilege, codified as NJ Evidence Rule 534 (“Rule”) will go into effect on July 16, 2016.  The Rule applies to legal proceedings in New ...