Digital Commons Network^™

The Role And Legal Status Of Health Care Ethics Committees In The United States, Diane E. Hoffmann, Anita J. Tarzian

Faculty Scholarship

Over a quarter of a century has passed since health care ethics committees (HCECs) in the United States received legal recognition as alternatives to the courts in resolving conflicts related to patient end-of-life care. By the mid to late 1980s HCECs had been established in over half of U.S. hospitals and had received a certain legitimacy in the health care system. Given their age and growth one could characterize them developmentally as emerging from adolescence and establishing themselves in young adult-hood. As a result, we might expect that they would have resolved the identify crisis characterizing the adolescent years. Yet, …

Book Review: "Human Dignity And Bioethics: Essays Commissioned By The President's Council On Bioethics, Leslie Meltzer Henry

Faculty Scholarship

The President’s Council on Bioethics frequently invokes -- but never defines -- the notion of human dignity in its reports on caregiving, stem-cell research, cloning, assisted reproduction, and biomedical enhancement. This article argues that the Council employs the language of dignity so loosely in its policy recommendations that the word is often nothing more than a rhetorical trump card to reject policies at odds with the Bush administration’s perspective. This article examines how the Council uses the word dignity; explores competing philosophical, theological, and political understandings of the word; and suggests ways in which a more productive dialogue about dignity's …

Relational Duties, Regulatory Duties, And The Widening Gap Between Individual Health Law And Collective Health Policy, William M. Sage

Faculty Scholarship

In response to a prominent editorial by Dr. Jeffrey M. Drazen, Professor Sage explains how a relational approach has impeded health law's ability to effectively govern the American health care system, arguing that health law has traditionally focused on the physician-patient encounter rather than on achieving collective objectives (which he calls regulatory duties). Professor Sage traces health law's relational emphasis to private and public law, professional ethics and bioethics, budgetary and general politics, and health care consumerism. He concludes that four areas of health policy-conflicts of interest in biomedical research, managed care and pay-for-performance, health care transparency and education, and …

The Legacy Of The Nuremberg Doctors' Trial To American Bioethics And Human Rights, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

In this lecture I argue that modern bioethics was born at the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial, a health law trial that produced one of the first major human rights documents: the Nuremberg Code. Accepting this conclusion has significant consequences for contemporary American bioethics generally, and specifically in the context of our continuing global war on terror in which the United States uses physicians to help in interrogations, torture, and force-feeding hunger strikers.

The primary force shaping the agenda, development, and current state of American bioethics has not been either medicine or philosophy, but law, best described as health law. Like bioethics, …