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Full-Text Articles in Law

The Mystery Of Life In The Laboratory Of Democracy: Personal Autonomy In State Law, Adam J. Macleod Jan 2011

The Mystery Of Life In The Laboratory Of Democracy: Personal Autonomy In State Law, Adam J. Macleod

Cleveland State Law Review

This article attempts to carve a path between the two sides in this autonomy war. It begins by bringing into dialogue with each other four of the most influential legal philosophers of our day: Joseph Raz, Ronald Dworkin, John Finnis, and Robert George. Each of these four scholars makes bold and instructive claims about the value and limits of personal autonomy. The article then examines several different areas of state law where one might expect a principle of autonomy to be implicated, and articulates six important lessons that one can glean from state law about the relationship between personal autonomy …


How We Die: A New Prescription, Martin Bienstock Jan 2006

How We Die: A New Prescription, Martin Bienstock

Journal of Law and Health

The dawn of the twenty-first century brought with it a profound change in the way we experience death. Until the last decades of the twentieth century, our bodies died all at once: when the heart kidneys, lungs, or brain failed, the body's other organs failed with them. Modern medicine now allows us to die in pieces, with failing organs supported or supplanted by technology. Modern death is different not only biologically, but also sociologically. Until the twentieth century, death was a private event that took place in the home with the family. It offered one final opportunity for family members …


Beyond Washington V. Glucksberg: Oregon's Death With Dignity Act Analyzed From Medical And Constitutional Perspectives , Steven B. Datlof Jan 1999

Beyond Washington V. Glucksberg: Oregon's Death With Dignity Act Analyzed From Medical And Constitutional Perspectives , Steven B. Datlof

Journal of Law and Health

This Article examines several aspects of the medical and legal debate on physician-assisted suicide. Part I describes the Oregon Death with Dignity Act, the only existing American law legalizing physician assisted suicide. Understanding the provisions of the DWDA provides a concrete, practical framework for discussing the medical and constitutional issues central to the PAS debate. Part II considers the wisdom of the DWDA in light of current medical knowledge and practice. The law allows a patient, with only a few months to live, a human end to intolerable suffering under controlled conditions. It is carefully crafted to ensure that patient …


Respect For The Bioethical Dilemmas - The Case Of Physician-Assisted Suicide, Sixty-Fifth Cleveland-Marshall Fund Lecture, John A. Robertson Jan 1997

Respect For The Bioethical Dilemmas - The Case Of Physician-Assisted Suicide, Sixty-Fifth Cleveland-Marshall Fund Lecture, John A. Robertson

Cleveland State Law Review

In this lecture I begin an exploration of the role that respect for human life plays in contemporary bioethics. Although many bioethical dilemmas could be chosen to illustrate this role, I will focus on the case of physician-assisted suicide. This lecture emphasizes the role that respect for human life plays in arbitrating bioethical disputes that involve physician-assisted suicide. I hope to develop some generalizations about how respect for life and autonomy, beneficence and other values interact and thus constitute or define what respect for life means for us. Part I discusses assisted suicide and the ban against actively killing. Part …


Ancient Answers To Modern Questions: Death, Dying, And Organ Transplants - A Jewish Law Perspective, Stephen J. Werber Jan 1996

Ancient Answers To Modern Questions: Death, Dying, And Organ Transplants - A Jewish Law Perspective, Stephen J. Werber

Journal of Law and Health

To understand the application of Jewish Law to issues of death and the dying process one must first be aware of the importance of life, and saving life (pikuach nefesh), in Jewish thought. Judaism "attribut[es] . . . infinite value to human life. Infinity being indivisible, any fraction of life, however limited its expectancy or its health, remains equally infinite in value." The Mishnah teaches that creation began with a single human being to "teach you that to destroy a single human soul is equivalent to destroying an entire world; and that to sustain a single soul is …