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Making Biomedical Policy Through Constitutional Adjudication:The Example Of Physician-Assisted Suicide, Carl E. Scheider
Making Biomedical Policy Through Constitutional Adjudication:The Example Of Physician-Assisted Suicide, Carl E. Scheider
Book Chapters
Throughout most of American history no one would have supposed biomedical policy could or should be made through constitutional adjudication. No one would have thought that the Constitution spoke to biomedical issues, that those issues were questions of federal policy, or that judges were competent to handle them. Today, however, the resurgence of substantive due process has swollen the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment, the distinction between federal and state spheres is tattered, and few statutes escape judicial vetting. Furthermore, Abraham Lincoln's wish that the Constitution should "become the political religion of the nation" has been granted. "We now reverently …
Concluding Thoughts: Bioethics In The Language Of The Law, Carl E. Schneider
Concluding Thoughts: Bioethics In The Language Of The Law, Carl E. Schneider
Book Chapters
What happens when the language of the law becomes a vulgar tongue? What happens, more particularly, when parties to bioethical disputes are obliged to borrow in their daily controversies, the ideas, and even the language, peculiar to judicial proceedings? How suited are the habits and tastes and thus the language of the judicial magistrate to the political, and more particularly, the bioethical, questions of our time? We must ask these questions because, as the incomparable Tocqueville foresaw, it has become American practice to resolve political—and moral—questions into judicial questions. We now reverently refer to the Supreme Court as the great …