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Full-Text Articles in Law
Drugged, Carl E. Schneider
Drugged, Carl E. Schneider
Articles
The Supreme Court's recent decision in Gonzales v. Oregon, like its decision last year in Gonzales v. Raich (the "medical marijuana" case), again raises questions about the bioethical consequences of the Controlled Substances Act. When, in 1970, Congress passed that act, it placed problematic drugs in one of five "schedules," and it authorized the U.S. attorney general to add or subtract drugs from the schedules. Drugs in schedule II have both a medical use and a high potential for abuse. Doctors may prescribe such drugs if they "obtain from the Attorney General a registration issued in accordance with the …
Benumbed, Carl E. Schneider
Benumbed, Carl E. Schneider
Articles
I originally intended to write a column on tort liability and research ethics, and I still plan to do so. But this column is a cri de coeur as I finish another semester teaching law and bioethics. This year, I asked with growing frequency, urgency, and exasperation, "Must law's reverence for autonomy squeeze out the impulse to kindness? Where is the beneficence in bioethics?" These questions assail me every term. Why? Consider Steele v. Hamilton County Community Mental Health Board. Mr. Steele was involuntarily "hospitalized after his family reported that he was 'seeing things and trying to fight imaginary …
Experts, Carl E. Schneider
Experts, Carl E. Schneider
Articles
George Bernard Shaw famously said that all professions are conspiracies against the laity. Less famously, less elegantly, but at least as accurately, Andrew Abbott argued that professions are conspiracies against each other. Professions compete for authority to do work and for authority over work. The umpire in these skirmishes and sieges is the government, for the state holds the gift of monopoly and the power to regulate it. In Abbott's terms, "bioethics" is contesting medicine's power to influence the way doctors treat patients. If it follows the classic pattern, bioethics will solicit work and authority by recruiting government's power. A …
Making Sausage: The Ninth Circuit's Opinion, Carl E. Schneider
Making Sausage: The Ninth Circuit's Opinion, Carl E. Schneider
Articles
As I write, the Supreme Court has just agreed to hear Compassion in Dying v. Washington and Quill v. Vacco, the two cases in which United States circuit courts of appeals held that a state may not constitutionally prohibit physicians from helping a terminally ill person who wishes to commit suicide to do so. These cases have already received lavish comment and criticism, and no doubt the Supreme Court's opinion will garner even more. Reasonably enough, most of this analysis addresses the merits of physician-assisted suicide as social policy. I, here, want to talk about how setting bioethical policy …
Bioethics With A Human Face, Carl E. Schneider
Bioethics With A Human Face, Carl E. Schneider
Articles
This Article and the successor article I will shortly publish grow out of one reaction I have had to years of reading bioethical and legal literature. Let me begin by putting the point in its simplest, even crudest, form: That literature too often discusses the problems of health care in so disembodied and denatured a way that the patients and physicians, the family and friends, the dread and the disease are quite abstracted from the scene. The result is a literature that critically limits itself and that crucially oversimplifies the issues it confronts. There are, of course, reasons bioethical and …
Bioethics And The Family: The Cautionary View From Family Law, Carl E. Schneider
Bioethics And The Family: The Cautionary View From Family Law, Carl E. Schneider
Articles
For many years, the field of bioethics has been specially concerned with how the authority to make medical decisions should be allocated between doctor and patient. Today the patient's power-indeed, the patient's right-is widely acknowledged, at least in principle. But this development can hardly be the last word in our thinking about how medical decisions should be made. For one thing, sometimes patients cannot speak for themselves. For another, patients· make medical decisions in contexts that significantly include more participants than just the patient and doctor. Now, as this conference demonstrates, bioethics is beginning to ask what role the patient's …